OPINION:
As we will soon begin to view political campaigns for next year’s national election, it might be valuable to consult our history. It was James Madison, “father of the Constitution,” who invoked the following: “We have staked the whole future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence who sacrificed their lives and their fortunes to establish a new nation could never have imagined that we would now have willed our children a huge national debt, that governing and controlling ourselves is at present worsening, and that many would depend totally on government to sustain themselves. It is unlikely that the Founding Fathers intended to set this country on a course with the economic appearance of today’s Greece.
As many in Europe and elsewhere must now be discovering, our futures are not dependent upon government, they are built upon the individual choices we make. Madison could not have imagined the choice to de-Christianize our society. In more recent times, personages to include Britain’s Winston Churchill, Russia’s writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lebanon’s diplomat Charles Malik and our own Ronald Reagan would likely have agreed with Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he wrote, “Men have forgotten God, and that is why all this has happened.”
BERNARD BUDNEY
Temecula, Calif.
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