Reflection: Principles over Personalities

Men and women are born naturally free to develop as their nature allows. The Declaration of Independence gives it as:

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, ..."

We live in times when government has increasingly violated these sacred, because Divinely conveyed, rights. The rights of unborn children are not acknowledged and instead subordinated even unto death to the whim of their mothers using various incoherent arguments that are not based on reality but on selfish desires. We violate the Liberty of individuals through a maze of invasive and presumptive laws that lead to a loss of privacy, to an intrusive and constant expansion of takings for illicit and unconstitutional purposes so that no man's goods are his own but that the state makes a claim on them. These infringements of Liberty severely curtail each citizen's ability to pursue his own felicity whatever it may be.

The nature of this growing spirit is totalitarian and elitist. It seeks to place over us the judgment of others and substitute for our own goals the goals of those who say they seek our good but at every turn subordinate our own ends to theirs making of us a means to their own aggrandizement. This is a sham and goes by all sort of names designed to conceal it's true nature: Progressive, Liberal, Populist, and others. Rather than labels we should seek to know the principles which they espouse and then judge their observed actions by the declared principles. Where they do not agree they reveal themselves to be deceivers. A man's yes should mean yes and his no no. The dishonest man conceals his true character in what he calls a nuanced view and then does whatever he wants while saying whatever sounds good. Such mean mean nothing when they talk but to create the illusion of good will. We should demand more of our leaders than nice sounding words and fur-lined shackles.