An ordinary citizen's State of the Union

By Ted Lang
web posted January 28, 2002

We are all familiar with the annual ritual State of the Union address, and governors' state of the state addresses, but why not give recognition to a more meaningful evaluation of the state of government by one of the real people? Why not an evaluation by one of those in the trenches, feverishly struggling to prevent government from confiscating one's private property and all of his or her private earnings, which the worker needs to support, nurture and preserve family and home? Which is the more important entity we should all be hearing from and giving most reverence to?

Our Declaration changed an interpretation of God's will from that giving ecclesiastical justification to monarchs and replacing it with the sanctification of each and every human being's endowments of life, liberty and property, with the freedom to legally convert the latter for personal gain and enrichment.

It is indeed the purpose of our government to preserve those God-given freedoms, declared in that famous letter to England's George III in 1776. The spirit of '76 was written into law and finalized in our Constitution and reinforced in the clashes of opinion termed federalism and anti-federalism with the incorporation of the Bill of Rights; hence, the establishment of the superiority of the individual, which serves as the sole purpose and intent of the Government of the United States.

And to this end, We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

If we are to evaluate the state of both our endeavors as well as our results in our charge to form a more perfect union, clearly we should measure our efforts against those standards so enumerated.

Have we established Justice to the best of our ability? If we fail to hold accountable Bill Clinton for his treason in providing a potential future enemy nation with weapons of mass destruction, and allow his Attorney General to prevent investigation and judicial proceedings, how can justice be served by prosecuting a 20 year-old terrorist who renounced both his country and its religion? How can justice selectively applied be justice?

In setting an example to demonstrate the punishment in store for those who merely wish to enjoy the freedoms of both the First and Second Amendments in worshipping in their own way and maintaining an inventory of firearms intending them only for self-defense, we have permitted our government to gas, burn and slaughter innocent men, women and children on the pretext of their potential wrongdoing. And then we are punished by a terroristic madman blindly striking out and duplicating the brutality twice fold in retaliation.

We have further supported civil law and order by allowing our representatives to write into law property and asset forfeiture rules abolishing the due process that prevents the tyranny of bureaucratic plotting and unjust and illegal confiscation and conversion of private property, thereby nullifying the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

In the name of one war or another on the pretext of providing for the common defense, we have allowed our servants in government to engage in armed attacks on those not threatening us, and allowed various segments of government to enter private residences and property and discharge weapons without provocation.

We have allowed our servants to confiscate half our earnings and subjugate our property rights thereby equating our efforts in wealth gathering and savings to that of serfs in the Middle Ages. Our unjust and immoral taxes have eliminated our wealth and prosperity in the name of perfecting government, instead of enhancing our human freedoms to allow unlimited wealth restricted only by the individual constraints of ability and work ethic.

And in allowing those in government to ignore the basic constraints of decency and morality, our ruling class has overspent the fruits of our labor and thereby encumbered our posterity with the burden of expunging their unearned extravagances to embellish their own decadent lifestyles and debauchery.

In that the Preamble to our Constitution sets forth the intentions of our brief experiment in our limited government republic, any comprehensive state of the Union, by its very nature, must start by reviewing our intentions, and then compare them to our achievements. After such a dissertation, those in government should be fully informed.

This is Ted Lang's first contribution to Enter Stage Right. (c) Theodore E. Lang. All rights reserved

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