“A Prophetic Perspective From 1975“
By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners
© Copyright June 29, 2009 - All Rights Reserved
I have warned of the events that have transpired from government excesses and citizen apathy for a very long time. My interest in politics, freedom, liberty and property rights in general, began well over 30 years ago. In researching my early writings I ran across a letter to the editor I wrote in September of 1975. It warned of the very same things that are happening today. The letter was written just after the primary election of that year, when only 17% of the eligible voters voted. I was only 37 years old at the time and still my perception of that “present” and the impending future were dead on, as they are today. And as it seems, not many folks were listening then and way too few are listening now. The twin evils of apathy and government excesses are still with us in abundance and growing. The “absolute“ in all this is that the one, “apathy”, begets the other, “government excesses”. The 1975 letter-to the-editor went like this:
“In recent years I’ve taken a greater interest in newspaper editorials, featured columnists, as well as letters to the editor. I’ve enjoyed the TV documentaries as they define, or at least attempt to define, some of the more glaring ills of our growing society. I can only hope that this information gives me, at the very least, an apparent representation of what is truly happening in America today.”
“For the most part the trend in the media seems to be defining a departure by many, but certainly not all people of the United States, from some values that are interwoven within the very fibers of our inherent strength, capabilities and heritage. Values such as the validity of a man’s, or a woman’s, word; his honor, his pride in himself and his work, his integrity, his responsibility to his family, his community and to his country.”
“I see a rising tide of bureaucracy, social-ism, welfare-ism, unemployment-ism, overt union-ism, riots and radical cults, like environmentalist-sim. I see a decrease in morality. I see a decrease in the quality of and pride in workmanship. I see profiteering without regard to quality of product or service. I see an aimless drifting into a material world with the idea of getting as much as you can and giving as little as possible.”
“For all this pressure and candor from the media (now almost non-existent today) and its concerned citizenry, nothing is apparently happening in the right direction. I see individuals trying, but hopelessly drowned in the mire. Government, business and labor just keep getting larger and more complex, more out of hand, unmanageable. Individual man is losing control. And then, in last Tuesday’s primary election the reasons for the growing ills became crystal clear.”
“All 17% of you who decided to vote along side of me in our local elections, I commend and applaud you for whatever your reasons for voting. To the 83% of you (83%, can you fathom that?) who abdicated your responsibility and the welfare of your life, livelihood and freedom, I can only extend to you my indignation and disgust.”
“All you union people crying for more, more, more; all you older generation crying nobody’s taking care of us poor older folk; all you welfare takers and homeless with your hands out for a handout; all you young people wallowing in your irresponsibility; all you business people lobbying government for more protection. Each and everyone of you have forgotten why and how you came about possessing the great privilege to live in a free society and the heavy price paid to maintain it.”
“Many years ago, around the time the Declaration was written, a famous man said: “The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance“. This is not only appropriate to the defense against the enemies we can see, but it is doubly appropriate to the defense of the enemy we can’t see. That dreaded enemy of all. Apathy! Time is running out as the door to freedom is almost closed. And when the giant door of liberty clangs shut in your forlorn faces and the last faint ring fades quietly into obscurity, may each of you remember in anguish, the opportunity you had to keep that door open and may your inaction burn forever in your memories, like a red hot branding iron on your bare skin.”
That was 1975 and not much has changed since then. If anything, it has gotten much worse. The only bright spot is that government is now over-reaching so far beyond their constitutional limits, that more people are waking up to what their apathy has wrought. As they wake up, their anger is rising rapidly.
But even well before 1975, 1957 to be exact, another author predicted the future for America in exquisite detail. That author was Ayn Rand in her novel, “Atlas Shrugged”. She accurately predicted the sad state of America as it exists today. Let me close by repeating a few lines from the end of John Galt’s speech to the Nation, from Ayn Rand’s book:
“In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.
“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:
“I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine
.”
.”
What John Galt has said in his speech in the book Atlas Shrugged, is the very essence of individual liberty, the irrevocable gift from our creator. It is the substance of what millions of men and women have died for in the defense of freedom. No matter what you may think about his words or his oath, they are not a repudiation of compassion, as compassion is an act of volition ….. an act of free choice. Compassion is not and never should be, a mandate from government.
It is clear. The window for free Americans to save individual liberty is rapidly closing. The time and the place to act are right now. There may never be another chance, our situation being that dire.
Ron Ewart, President
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS
P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027
425 222-4742 or 1 800 682-7848
(Fax No. 425 222-4743)
Website: www.narlo.org
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March 17th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
those days are over. people are overworked and lied to from their government, maybe the end will come and solve some problems for everyone. who knows…