I’m tired of simply copying and pasting long passages from the History.com website – fascinating as most of the tidbits I choose may be. What’s needed here is a dose of Bulldog commentary, the kind that makes the historical tidbit in question that much more interesting to read. Henceforth, when you plotz in front of your computer with your favorite morning beverage (and I hope it isn’t bourbon) you’ll get a dose of canine sense only The Bulldog can dispense.
Wipe the dust off this declaration after November 6?
It will all depend on what happens on Election Day. If Romney is elected president we might – just might – have an outside, long-shot chance at averting total disaster. If Obama is re-elected, it’s over…the USA is finished and our radical transformation from a free-market republic to a socialist oligarchy will have begun in earnest. What then?
If history is any guide, several of the states will likely dust off a declaration made almost precisely one year BEFORE the Declaration of Independence:
On this day in 1775, one day after restating their fidelity to King George III and wishing him “a long and prosperous reign” in the Olive Branch Petition, Congress sets “forth the causes and necessity of their taking up arms” against British authority in the American colonies. The declaration also proclaimed their preference “to die free men rather than live as slaves.”
It would become known as the Declaration on Taking Up Arms and it was prompted largely by the recent events.
As in the Olive Branch Petition, Congress never impugned the motives of the British king. Instead, they protested, “The large strides of late taken by the legislature of Great Britain toward establishing over these colonies their absolute rule…” Congress provided a history of colonial relations in which the king served as the sole governmental connection between the mother country and colonies, until, in their eyes, the victory against France in the Seven Years’ War caused Britain’s “new ministry finding all the foes of Britain subdued” to fall upon “the unfortunate idea of subduing her friends also.”According to the declaration, the king’s role remained constant, but “parliament then for the first time assumed a power of unbounded legislation over the colonies of America,” which resulted in the bloodletting at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
Sounds a lot like what has happened with our own government, no? Ah…but surely there has been no bloodletting, right?
I suppose if we ignore what happened at Ruby Ridge in 1992, the case can be made that present circumstances aren’t nearly as dire or extreme – yet.
At this point, Congress assumed that if the king could merely be made to understand what Parliament and his ministers had done, he would rectify the situation and return the colonists to their rightful place as fully equal members of the British empire. When the king sided with Parliament, however, Congress moved beyond a Declaration of Arms to a Declaration of Independence.
Perhaps history will repeat itself. Time will tell. Tick-tock, tick-tock…
