March 20, 2008 | |
The Next 100 Years | |
by Ron Ewart, President National Association of Rural Landowners Copyright March 19, 2008- All Rights Reserved | |
Just about everyone is born with sight. But when they grow up, very few gain vision. Vision is the capability to take all that you know and project what might happen in the future, then base your actions on that prediction. Often times, the more you know the greater the possibility of an accurate projection. Vision comes from reviewing the past, analyzing the present and using that knowledge to forecast the future. Even with all this knowledge, forecasting the future, just like predicting the weather or global warming, can be very difficult and borders on crystal-balling at best. Still, many try, but many more are wrong. They are wrong because the system they are trying to predict is a non-linear dynamic system and any small tweaking can produce huge differences in direction. Any changes in one or more variables can render a prediction instantly irrelevant. Say we want to look forward 100 years and guess what the conditions will be like then? One attempt is to go back 100 years and see where we have come. But instead, we are going to go back 230 years. The Founding Fathers looked back at 150 years of British colonial rule from roughly 1620 to 1770 and made their own predictions. British rule was gaining in excessive abuses and the Founders tried to divine the future by establishing a set of rules (our constitution) that free men could live by, that required dissolving their relationship with their homeland, a bold, dangerous and courageous move on their part. The basic principle of these new rules was that as an individual, you have certain inalienable rights, but with those rights come individual responsibility. The general rule was ".....you take care of your life and government will stay out of your way." But today, 230 years later, it is now "government will take care of you and you had better not get in their way." A vastly different approach to our original designs on freedom and individual liberty. Hardly what the Founding Fathers had in mind. But just like the fish that is enticed by the bait and makes the mistake of trying to eat the camouflaged hook, the people of America have taken the bait and the "hook" is slavery. The government has been directly complicit in putting out the "bait" and has purposely played on the human weaknesses of greed, laziness and apathy in order to assume greater power. Whom can we blame but ourselves, because we let them do it. So what does the next 100 years bring? That depends on two things. 1. Can the people who are aware of the direction we are going, have the will and the courage to do what it takes to change that direction back towards freedom? 2. Or will the growing number of people who have taken the "bait" because of their greed, laziness and apathy, deliver us into the hands of the devil and abject slavery? If one were to analyze the current direction without a course correction, slavery is our future. But only time will tell, as any prediction is impossible to make, because the behavior of people and the events that motivate them over long periods of time, are extremely difficult to determine with any accuracy. In 1776 could anyone have predicted that the colonials would defeat England? Everything was stacked against them and it was touch and go until close to the very end. It is still touch and go today, but the enemy is not our old homeland or a foreign country. The enemy is our own human weakness that seeks the easy path, that seeks security over liberty, that seeks a free "lunch", naively thinking that the "lunch" is actually free. The path to freedom was very hard and won at great cost. The path to preserve freedom will be equally hard on the cost will be high. But are we now too soft to make the hard, necessary choices? That question makes prediction about our freedom for the next 100 years, almost impossible. It is all up to WE THE PEOPLE. What we do now will seal our children's and grand children's future. | |
Ron Ewart, President | |
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS Dedicated to restoriing, maintaining and defending private property rights P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027 WE'RE REALLY COUNTING ON YOU TO HELP US CONTINUE THIS FIGHT. | |
Good Neighbor Committee | Good Neighbor Law© 2006 | | |