The Barbarians Within America 

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”   …   Hilaire Belloc

How many times have you heard someone say that when liberals are out of power their antics are funny …  but when they are in power they are dangerous?  My guess is you have heard it many times.  Most of us are quite familiar with it, in fact.

Today America is living the nightmare … disguised by the Left as the American dream.

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
— Edward Gibbon

Mr. Gibbon could easily have been describing modern day America rather than ancient Athens.  America’s coffers are empty largely to provide Americans a comfortable life.  And, just lie the Athenians, we are losing everything, our security, our comfort, and most important, our FREEDOM. 

We have a government ruled by those barbarians America used to laugh at.  And they are solidifying and tightening their grasp on the throat of America’s freedom squeezing it out of existence. Viewing the constitution as nothing more than a speed bump, they are determined to drag America from the pinnacle to the cesspool -- and they are enjoying great success in their strivings!

In a recent commentary I noted how the peoples of a number of states have become so alarmed at the Obama government that they are harkening back to their rights as sovereign states and employing state nullification laws to countermand federal mandates intended to yoke them with federal laws to which they disagree and find overbearing, and massive financial costs they cannot bear.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of America, said the following:  “ Whenever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”  He was there at the birth of this nation, so he ought to know!

Thomas Paine, one of America’s great pamphleteers, author of “Common Sense,” and certainly one of the great rabble-rousers of all time -- and in many ways responsible for the American colonists’ revolution against Great Britain commented thusly: Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worse state, an intolerable one.”  No truer words were ever spoken. 

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the renowned French historian, in writing about what we call today “Big Government” said the following: “It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

After reading de Tocqueville’s words above your brain happens to form the words “OBAMACARE” on the TV screen of your mind… then you, sir/madam, GET IT! 

Today we have first-hand knowledge of the destruction out-of-control big government can levy on a nation – even the most powerful nation on the globe.  Americans are weighted down, yoked to government as oxen were once yoked to the plow. Heads down, shoulders hunched forward were are pulling the weight with the near debilitating knowledge that our efforts only make the yoke stronger and will, eventually, end in our demise.

"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.”  Thus wrote Frederic Bastiat a French economist, statesman, and author in the 1800’s.

Freedom is slowly being crushed in America.  As an American, now in my seventh decade of living in America, I can tell you, with no hesitation at all, that I am not nearly as free as I was only a decade or two ago. Freedom, once lost, is nigh impossible to regain.  That’s why free peoples should fight every attempt to take from them even the smallest and seemingly least important freedom.

The man who has done more to diminish America and set her on a course to becoming another third-world dung heap is now asking Americans to give him four more years in which to complete the job.

I remain convinced nothing short of divine intervention can halt the wholesale destruction of a free America led by Barack Hussein Obama.

J. D. Longstreet