ARTICLES: July 18, 2004

"Can We Turn Back The Clock?"

By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners
© Copyright July 18, 2007 - All Rights Reserve

Time always runs forward.  It has no backward component, unless somehow we invent time travel.  What has taken place IS and no matter how hard we try, history will record it for all to see.  If we have made a mistake, in some cases we can reverse it.  In others, reversal is simply impossible and all we can do is pay for the mistake and then apologize for it.  But what if governments make mistakes?  They very rarely pay for it because their money is our money.  And they vary rarely apologize for it, because they don't have to.  They just promote the perpetrator, or they appropriate more of our money to pay for the mistake, while we stand in docile anquish at their audacity.
 
Now that we have been fully immersed in socialism and radical environmentalism for five score and seven, is there any hope of undoing what has been done, when so many of American citizens have forsaken freedom and liberty in exchange for the phantom veil of security and comfort?  How can we turn back the clock to a time when Americans were self-reliant instead of dependent, when they were responsible for their actions instead of being excused for them because they are victims of all of societies ills, when the rule of law meant something, when they were individuals with individual rights, not part of a collective where only the collective has rights, when they looked to themselves to get them out of a scrape, instead of holding their outstretched hands to a nanny government for rescue and salvation? 
 
How can we unravel the tangled web of razor wire that is our legal and unjust justice system?   How do you convince lawmakers that what they are doing is sapping the very strength and vitality out of our people by being everything for them and regulating every aspect of their lives?
 
How do you round up and send 13,000,000 illegal aliens back across the border they chose to violate, because our government and special interests created a magnet for them to come here in the first place?  How do we stop the hemorrhaging of our tax dollars to an ever-rising crisis that is illegal immigration?
 
How do you tell a person that the handouts they are receiving from government are coming from someone else's sweat, labor and earnings and that what they are excepting is morally wrong, even though several generations in their extended family have been receiving those handouts?  There are those in our society that need our help, but should that help come from government?  Should it not be the outpouring of compassion through those entities that are best able to administer it, in the private sector?  Unfortunately, there are way too many people in America that are getting government help that shouldn't be and the cost to our treasury and to the recipients independence and pride, is astronomical.
 
Finally, how do you undo the power that our government has amassed by violating the constitutional limits on its powers for a hundred years, while WE THE PEOPLE looked the other way?
 
There are two unchangeable axioms that are as inviolate as the Sun coming up in the morning.  1) Those receiving something, (like handouts from government) resist giving it up and will fight tooth and nail to preserve it.  It doesn't matter to them the source of the handouts, and 2) power grows exponentially beyond its limits, unless there is a corresponding power to inhibit it.
 
It took 156 years from 1620 to 1776 for the colonials to have enough of England and King George III to jump-start their clock forward to freedom and liberty and they paid an incalculable price.  The greatest price and the greatest sacrifice of all, the giving of one's life for liberty.  Will it take another 156 years for Americans to finally see the light and commit themselves to the fight for freedom?  Perhaps in 2050 we will be closer to an answer.
 

But all the talk, all the rhetoric, all the articles in the world will not turn back the clock to America's finer yesteryear.  Either the believers and fighters in the defense of freedom and liberty, coalesce as one on a grand scale, or the hands of the American clock will click ever onward towards abject socialism, radical environmentalism and the one world order.  The clock's inertia is almost 100 years old.   The Pendulum of our clock swings ever wider towards enslavement, as freedom smiles from a distance and then fades into a dim memory of all things past.  The only human characteristics that will set things right and return this once-great land to its former greatness, is vehemence, determination, boldness and the willingness to risk all by the multitudes who seek freedom, so that future generations will be and remain free.  Nothing less will turn back the clock of time, or jump it forward to a brighter future in the brilliant light of freedom and liberty, from which the pursuit of all happiness springs.
 
Abraham Lincoln best descibed the American Clock to which we should return, when he said:
 
"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.  You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.  You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.  You cannot further the brotherhood of many by encouraging class hatred.  You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.  You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.  You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.  You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."

 
We have been bewitched by traitors from within, who haunt the halls of our government and taunt the devil within them and us.  The traitors bring servitude instead of freedom, security instead of liberty, and dependence instead of self reliance.  We must be forever on our guard to prevent the traitor from convincing us that we are but victims and are in constant need of our father-mother government, to watch out over us.  Almost 2050 years ago, wise men knew the evils of the traitor within and the devil that stalks freedom in the night and in the back rooms where ambitious men lay the seeds of salvery for all.
 
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.  But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.  For the traitor appears not as a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to fear."   Marcus Tullius Cicero 42  B.C.
 
The clock is ticking as liberty seeks men who are willing to lay it all on the line to limit the power of government, so that freedom may enter and remain in the hearts and minds of all people forever and government fears the people, instead of the other way around.
 
 
 
 Ron Ewart, President

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS
P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA  98027
425 222-4742 or 1 800 682-7848
(Fax No. 425 222-4743)
Website: www.narlo.org