Thomas Paine Exhorts Parents

“As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.” Thomas Paine, Common Sense – 1776

It is my job, as a parent, to raise and protect the children that God has given me. It goes beyond the obvious needs of food, clothing and shelter and into an even greater need of “Train(ing) a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6.  Raising a child involves love, discipline, education and looking out for their needs now, as it will affect them when they are old. If parents in America only provide for a child’s physical needs, forgetting to nurture the whole child, then American parents have done nothing more than what a wild animal does for its offspring. My work as a parent goes well beyond the obvious and must be intentional in training, raising, and nurturing them into moral, ethical and God-fearing adults who will in turn also raise a generation who live and do likewise.

I must also fight for the ethical and moral rights of my children in the political arena, as they are unable to do so for themselves. As Paine stated, “We ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully.” He was looking at his posterity realizing that the condition of the country in which they lived needed a drastic overhaul and unless the adults stepped up and took the initiative, the children would suffer for it. He recognized that it was his responsibility to leave to the next generation, a country and a constitution that would be radically different from that which the world had seen. He said, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent – of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of continental union, faith and honor.”

We are in a battle that represents more than just regaining the Congress with a Republican majority. This is about the America our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit. It is waged for their future and for the hope that they will continue to live in a country that is still a shining light on the hill in contrast to all the nations of the earth that have been, are and will be. Freedom must always be guarded and battle lines must always be armed to defend freedom. When people become apathetic and lulled into a false sense of security, the enemies of freedom infiltrate and erode from within. The city on the hill has allowed the Trojan horse to enter the gates, yet because we know the story of the horse, we can destroy it, before it destroys the country that we love and cherish.

America is awake and fighting mad. I pray that it is more than personal and that those who are showing up to the Tea Parties are doing so for this generation, the generation to follow and the one that came before. This fight can not be merely a selfish angst against health care reform, but rather a righteous indignation that America, bought with the blood of thousands of men and woman; can not, should not, be allowed to become like every the other nation in the history of the world. America was given the opportunity in the pages of history to be different, to not be like the European nations across the great Atlantic, but to strike out and begin a republic that would be a “new world….the asylum for the persecuted, lovers of civil and religious liberty from every Part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster…..” (pg 139, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense) We must not allow the struggle of our Nation for a Republic Democracy in 1776, to become a wisp on the pages of history, but rather the defining government in all of history. We must not believe that the struggle ended with the surrender of Britain over two hundred years ago, but rather continues today through the diligent care of those who hold democracy in their hands: we the people.

We the people are we the parents of the future of this nation. Our children depend upon us to stand up for their future rights by being involved in the process of our government. We are not governed, we are the government. However, if we allow ourselves to be controlled by those in Washington, instead of controlling them, then we have lost sight of what our job entails, and what their elected position requires. We can not be so busy living life that we forget to protect the very home that we will be leave to our children. We can not be so busy playing, that we forget our duty to provide for the future of our kids. We can not be so apathetic, that we are not diligent to train up our children, to feed our children and to protect them from those who don’t have their personal best interest at heart.

Our posterity depends upon “We the Parents in and of these 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 tour posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”