A Threat To The Republic

[JMadonna]

(02-18-2019 02:05 PM)L Verge Wrote:  

(02-17-2019 03:20 PM)JMadonna Wrote:  I guess an author is his own worst critic. Glad you liked the illustrations, that was exactly the reason I included them. I think actual sketches and editorial cartoons give the feel of the times.

WARNING... I feel a small rant emanating from reading the morning paper .....

Most of my histories are written from the Washington point of view and I gotta say that there was never a 'golden age' for this city. It remains, in my opinion, no place for an honest man. It's always been a place where greed and corruption meet to manipulate the masses. The Civil War was the worst of times and Lincoln deserves all credit for keeping things together.

I think the founding fathers understood that corruption and freedom needed to co-exist and designed the constitution to give us divided government. I believe that we will remain a constitutional government because to scrap it, as some would advocate, would surrender our enumerated 'inalienable rights' to whatever new political wave promises to modernize them.

Simply put, the constitution will survive because the people will always want it to.

I agree with your points, Jerry, but I wish I could be as optimistic as you as to future generations holding on to our constitutional principles and a strong republic. To use the title of your book, I think our country faces one of the largest threats to the republic that it has ever had.

IMO, even the Confederate States of America supported constitutional rights. The forces that are threatening us (especially from within) now do not hold those same inalienable rights and principles. I am not even certain that some of the high-placed politicians on Capitol Hill do either.

My mother died ten years ago at age 94. She had no higher education than high school, but she was common sense smart and well-read. When her great-grandson was born in 2000, she held him in her arms and said, "I don't want to see the world that you will be inheriting, my little love." I'm sure that all exiting generations feel the same fear for what lies ahead for their descendants, but I now hold the same feelings that my mother had -- and living twelve miles from Washington, D.C. doesn't help in the least...

Every generation has seen the end of the world coming ( remember Y2k?.... stupid Mayans). But our republic has survived far worse in the Civil War and other struggles. Lincoln's greatness was rooted in his confidence that our government of consent by the governed, based on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, would endure.

Since he was never a slaveholder - he's still regarded as politically correct.