America: A People Pushed Again Toward Revolution

Commentary

The American colonists proved their patience with King George III. He proved their patience could run out. It was approximately 12 years between the first act issued by his Highness across the Atlantic and the first shots fired across Lexington and Concord.

The King and Parliament had made clear their disdain for the colonists, who were surely no more recipients of the rights of Englishmen than any other subjugated specimen in the British Empire. They would be taxed without their consent. They would house British soldiers without their consent. They would purchase their goods from Britain without their consent. They would do as the King and Parliament pleased “in all cases whatsoever” without their consent.

The colonists had reached their boiling point, and the age of reason declared the Crown absolutely unreasonable. As Samuel Adams so clearly stated, “Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First, a right to life. Second, to liberty. Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.” It was a sentiment issued in 1772 and embraced throughout the colonies, and has been the bastion of America to its present day.

That same year, Joseph Warren implored his fellow colonists to “be wise in your deliberations, and determined in your exertions for the preservation of your liberties … enlist yourselves under the sacred banner of reason; use every method in your power to secure your rights.” Warren would follow his own instructions to the very letter by fighting and dying three years later at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

That same year Warren was killed, Patrick Henry emphatically stated, “If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us.”

An appeal to arms and the God of Hosts was made one month later at Lexington Green in Massachusetts. John Parker, captain of the Lexington Company for the militia of the Middlesex County Brigade, stated the moment clearly: “If they want to have a war, let it begin here.”

Thomas Paine understood the moment, perhaps more clearly than most, when he wrote “Common Sense” the following year. It was obvious to him that America should declare her independence from the British Crown and not merely fight for the right of representation in a Parliament 3,000 miles away. He also understood something perhaps few others did, and that was that “the cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.”

That same year, the Declaration of Independence made known to mankind why it was necessary for the American colonists “to dissolve the political bands” that had connected them with the British people. The American Revolution had now been set in stone.

We stand here nearly 245 years later on the precipice of another revolution. It may be difficult to analyze precisely where we are in comparison to the first. Are we in the midst of the passionate speeches? Have we entered the proverbial Lexington Green? Or has the American finally reached their Declaration of Independence moment making the choice between liberty and death?

I can’t say for certain where we are in our moment of political and social turmoil. To require such precision is unnecessary. What I do know without doubt is that such has been the patient sufferance of these Americans that it appears time to alter their current systems of government and to return to the country’s former system of government. It’s time to return to the true federalism and republicanism that our Founding Fathers established.

Citizens on the left and the right have made it clear that what America has become legislatively, judicially, and executively is a blight on the American experiment. The country that for so long fought for the cause of freedom, now struggles to consider the cause worth fighting for. The issues of the current crisis are echoes of the very reasons why 56 men mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

I say, as our founders did, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

  • Governors, mayors, county judges, and legislative branches prefer the rich and powerful over the middle class, poor, and less influential.
  • The federal and state governments have “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers, to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
  • Too often our courts and law enforcement agencies obstruct the administration of justice and are protected by qualified or absolute immunity establishing oftentimes nothing more than mock trials.
  • Our trade has officially been cut off by the forced closure of our small businesses, while those corporations, who thrive off the security ensured by their government officials, succeed in ways never thought possible in past times.
  • Federal and state agencies run by unelected officials punish citizens who dare to be in accidental violation of their regulations and are then sent to a private courtroom where the verdict and sentencing is conducted by judges established by those very unelected officials, ultimately depriving us of our right to a trial by jury.
  • Our Congress has become the laughing stock of other countries and that of this nation’s history by creating laws, as James Madison stated, “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”
  • Furthermore, Congress has become more obsessed with passing laws that are unwholesome and unnecessary for the public good, and dictating to states and local governments their preferred methods of governance, or threatening them with financial retribution if they don’t abide.
  • The Supreme Court has continually defied the Constitution of the United States and its Bill of Rights, which is equivalent to “taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our government.”
  • Our federal, state, and local governments have taken on the role of King George III and have complicitly “burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
  • By their cruel methods of governing, truly alien in the annals of our nation’s history, they have “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.”

As the Founding Fathers stated 245 years ago, I state here, and I believe many millions of others state it with me, that “in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” These so-called princes, “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, [are] unfit to be the ruler[s] of a free people.”

I’m quite certain that, just as during our first revolution, many will find the words of our Founding Fathers unsuited for 2021. They will choose to close their eyes to the obviousness of the current crisis. They will not adhere to the cries of their fellow countrymen, perhaps because the financial devastation or the political drumming out or the slow closing of a windpipe till death takes over has not happened to them, or has not happened close enough to see with clear eyes the tyranny that has a stranglehold on the less than powerful among us.

To those I repeat the words of Samuel Adams uttered in Philadelphia one month after the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

I can’t predict what this year or future years will bring to this country. True, it may not be time to “make an appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts,” but I do truly believe it’s time to throw the proverbial tea into the harbor. It’s past time for civil disobedience across this country, to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are, as we speak, losing everything they own: their homes, their livelihoods, even their very lives. It has been more than 10 months of mask mandates, social distancing, and business and social restrictions that defy logic. The patient sufferance must soon come to an end, and I say it end today, before we fulfill the very warning of Benjamin Franklin and lose this republic.

I do sincerely pray the words of Joseph Warren that “may we ever be a people favored of God! May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the world in one common undistinguished ruin!”

But if living under tyranny is to be our fate. If our posterity is to be the recipient of a dictatorship. If America as a free republic is to end, as all nations and empires must, then hearken closely now, with me, to the words of Patrick Henry and make your choice: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Dustin Bass is the co-host of The Sons of History podcast and the creator of the Thinking It Through YouTube channel. He is also an author.