Back in January, 1944, just four years before Walt Kelly’s Pogo first appeared, President Franklin Roosevelt, in his annual address to Congress, set the nation on a path that would destroy America as the founders envisioned it. The plan he declared to the nation in that speech was destined, if not designed, to make America its own enemy.

There is a right way to think about and a right way to do something about the mess that American has become. We cannot and should not despair. Rather, we should decide and declare our commitment to live liberty and to pass on the Blessings of Liberty to our posterity.

Does it drive you crazy when you hear politicians and talking heads refer to America as a “democracy”? If it does, I sympathize with you. And so do the founders. What didJames Madison, our fourth President and the man they call the “Father of the Constitution,” say about democracies?

You notice two men fighting in your front yard. They are pushing and shoving and punching each other as they stumble up your driveway. Shouting and cursing at each other, they crash through your front door and continue the mayhem right into your living room. Suddenly, from another part of the house, you hear a thud of a door slamming and you realize with horror that while you were distracted by the fake fight in the front room, someone has made it out the back door with the contents of your safe, everything that you have ever worked for.

Despite man’s attempt to defy gravity, it is immutable. Obviously, we can see clearly that the law of gravity, one of the physical laws of the universe, is not within our power to ignore or to repeal. We really can’t break it without getting broken by it.

Barack Obama has repeatedly threatened that if Congress doesn’t give him his way on immigration and bailouts and Obamacare, he’ll just do it himself. After all, he’s got a pen and a phone. All these bailouts and threatened executive action got me to thinking that maybe there is a common underlying and unspoken premise.

If you listen to talk radio, you get a steady stream of rhetoric promoting what is called conservatism. I hope in the next minute or so to get you thinking about whether being conservative is really to be right.

“Anyone who desires to be ignorant and free, desires what never was and never will be.” When Jefferson, the principle author of the American Declaration of Independence, wrote these words, he was expressing a truth that relatively few Americans appreciate today.

Are you an American? If you are, can I ask you a question? In your way of thinking, what makes you an American? Is it where you were born? Is it because of where you presently live? Does a SSN make you an American? Or a passport or driver’s License?

In the last few years, the idea of learning about our freedom documents has fallen out of favor in our government schools and perhaps has been neglected in our families, our churches, and our communities as well. Regrettably, more and more, as Americans, we know less and less about where we come from.