Don't Tread On Me

When the men and women of our nations beginning decided to revolt against their king, their established government, it wasn’t because they were being tortured. It wasn’t because they were hungry and starving. I wasn’t because they lived in poverty. It was because they were thinking of the men and women of today.

Each and every one of those reasons would have been an easy justification for revolt, for change. Yet if you review history, you find that the people who sacrificed all on our behalves suffered not these challenges. What they needed, they made, or traded for; not much different from today. However, they held as a core belief that a person was responsible for themselves. They asked not for handouts, they asked not for credit, they asked not. Period. This core belief was what earned them the rights to revolt, what gave them the passion to stand up to the greatest army they had known, and much had served in. They understood that each person was equal and as such deserved the right to be that way. This all came from the self independence they possessed. They knew that if they could not take care of themselves, then how could they take care of others? And if they could not take care of others, then what gave them the rights to govern themselves. They understood responsibility in ways that shame us, that we call fiction and can only find in movies and books. Were they better than us? Undoubtedly. Where they different from us? The honest answer is no. Was life that much rougher for them that they were forced to revolt? Again, no. Compare the living conditions of them to our inner cities and it seems like paradise. Why then? Why did they choose the hard path? Why did they choose the actions that led to them loosing their sons, their daughters, whole towns? They knew that if THEY did not act, then never would the course change. So what was the course they wanted changed?

Because they held themselves responsible for themselves and asked not from anyone else, they expected, nay they DEMANDED, the same from each other. They valued concepts such as respect, integrity, courtesy, and common decency. They demanded it of themselves and expected the next man or woman to demand it of themselves as well. The neighbor who didn’t was thought of as simple at best, and as an animal at worst…and they knew how to deal with animals. All of these concepts can be rolled up into so many words, but the one I choose, and I imagine they used was HONOR. They treated others with honor, and they expected to be treated the same. What they were finding is that the English government wasn’t living up to the colonists ideals, and put quite simply they had a very hard time tolerating it from someone who they did not have to answer to, and no tolerance for someone they did. Unfair taxes, illegal search and seizure, double standards from the officials representing the government, were only a few of the things they saw. As honorable people, they attempted to change this through speech, patience, protest, so many ways and yet they found their voices went unheard, their actions unnoticed. Enough had become enough. If not them, then logically wouldn't their children be subject to so much more? If not them, then how long before it became so route that no one would think of asking? If not them, then how long before honor was not something that was valued, became something that was actually a rarity, or worse a crime. How long before what they had worked so hard for became forgotten?

Writing this, I wish I could stand before them, to apologize to them for what we have let our nation become. I have the feeling though, that they would not accept it. They would consider us not worthy of offering them this, and wonder how they failed.

I love and honor our countries ideals. I have served in our Armed Forces. I have said this before, and I will say again I would kill or die for them, but these very ideals of our country are THE ideals that all of us should be willing to make the same sacrifices for. It is not the fact that we are the United States of America; it is the goals of those who founded this country had choosen. Those goals are worthy of the sacrifice, of my honor. I cannot help but think of those goals and compare them to how we live as a country today. Compare the same reasons they choose to rise up then, to what I see today. How do I honor them without being willing to do the same, to breathe their words? The words they so elegantly put down in our Declaration of Independence;

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Let mine not be the only voice calling for radical change. It is time for action. It is time for revolution.