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Who can say for sure when we began to forfeit our freedoms? Please don’t complain that “they” are taking away our freedoms. Our government is designed so that We The People are responsible for what the government does. That we have bargained that away is on us. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would trade liberty (freedom) for safety, deserve neither”. The number of Americans who have willingly ceded a portion of their freedom for safety is growing. Sometimes it has happened as a result of unintended consequences. Other times it results from an overt act of cowardice. How it has happened is not as important as THAT it has happened. As I have taught my children and grandchildren, decisions have consequences.

In adopting our Constitution, the Founding Fathers (FF) created a Federalist form of government that gave the lion’s share of power to the states and the people. One could argue that ever since then, the federal government (FG) has been fighting to take that power away from the states. As the FG usurps state’s rights, people’s names get replaced by numbers. And it gets increasingly difficult to get anything done. The FG has proven, time and time again, it is incapable of getting things done correctly, on schedule, and on budget.

The FG told us what kind of toilet and what kind of light bulbs we could buy. Just a nuisance you say? Perhaps. As free people we should have demanded they stay out of our business. We didn’t, so the encroachments got more aggressive. We were told what size car we could buy. Now we are being told what kind of car we can own. The FG’s decision to reduce fossil fuel production will impoverish more Americans, and cause poor people all over the world to starve to death. We The People must stand as one and tell the FG to go to hell. That we won’t stand for their uncaring incompetence.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, government attacks on our liberties accelerated. In 2001, a lunatic on a transatlantic flight tried to detonate a bomb hidden in his shoe. Since then, Americans have been forced to take their shoes off for screening before they could board flights. (Thank goodness he didn’t hide it in his underwear)! Then Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act. The law allows federal law enforcement to do “sneak and peak” investigations, to access our purchasing records, gain access to our emails, and requires banks to report any deposits we make over $10,000. Never in our country’s history has the privacy of the American people been so terribly invaded. The surveillance powers given to law enforcement in the PATRIOT Act are being used to persecute innocent people who oppose the Democrat Party. As the tools of surveillance improve we can expect our liberties to be further eroded. The government swore it would limit the use of the surveillance powers of the Act to watch foreigners. Honest people knew the government couldn’t pass up such a powerful, frightening, and coercive tool. Those people have proven to be prophetic.

The COVID pandemic gave the political elite a rare opportunity to be sanctimonious while simultaneously taking away our freedom. It gave them the opportunity to accumulate power specifically denied by the Constitution. We The People were told we had to stay in our homes for a couple of weeks to “flatten the curve” of infections caused by the virus. That was understandable, given the fact that nothing was known about the virus. That 2 weeks kept expanding until we were into the second year. What happened over those 2 years was inexcusable, harmful, and illegal. We were told we couldn’t get haircuts or go out to eat. Church services were cancelled and our children were prevented from attending school. We were told we needed a passport to prove we were vaccinated in order to go to restaurants or sporting events. After a vaccine was created, nurses, police officers, and others, were required to take the vaccine. Failure to comply meant a loss of employment. Really? In the United States of America? I cannot think of another time in my life when our government curtailed so many of our freedoms in such a short period of time. Many government edicts will be harmful to Americans into the foreseeable future.

We are losing/have lost our right to speak freely. In your wildest dreams did you ever think you would see a time when Americans would suffer raids into their homes, in front of their children, by armed FBI agents? For picketing abortion clinics? Can you believe there are Americans who have been in jail for over a year without being charged for a crime? That shouldn’t happen in the USA. That is so like the Chinese Communist Party. Does it bother you that the Dept. of Justice has ordered FBI agents to surveille parents who dare speak up for their children at school board meetings? People are labeled homophobic bigots if they speak up against boys using girl’s locker facilities and participating on girl’s athletic teams. By allowing boys on girl’s athletic teams, girls are being denied the opportunity to perform and succeed on a level playing field. Girls who are forced to compete with boys are shamed into silence by the media/press and by woke classmates and adults. I would never have believed this could happen in the greatest nation on earth.

We are in the process of abandoning perhaps the final vestige of a free people. That is our morality. If the process we use to elect our representatives is believed to be corrupt, and no effort is made to fix it, we are in trouble. When we stop trusting those who are elected, our country is in peril. That we blindly reelect those we know are causing us problems, signals an unhealthy ignorance in the citizenry. There is something very wrong with a society that bans Bibles in classrooms but regularly sets aside an hour to allow drag queens to read to our elementary school children. We are failing our moral responsibility when pornographic books are readily available in many school libraries. Parents are finally beginning to push back against these things. Perhaps it is not too late. Our morality is truly being challenged by those who think it is okay to kill children anytime during a mother’s pregnancy. Today, I watched as the Majority Leader of the Senate said the USA is not producing enough babies to sustain our population. Therefore, he proclaimed, we need to allow more illegals to enter our country. This is the same guy who favors aborting hundreds of thousands of American babies every year. To turn a blind eye to the slaughter of innocent unborn babies is barbaric on its face. People who want this to happen are shameful. Those who allow it to happen are complicit. We simply must, state by state, pass compassionate laws that satisfy both pregnant women, and save unborn babies. All that is necessary is that two opposing sides search their humanity and put morality ahead of their ideology.

Thank you for reading my blog. If you think it is relevant, please take the time to forward it to your friends. Bob