Why you matter

If you’re like me, the Founding Fathers were a bit of a dim abstraction. In my view of history, they went to a great deal of trouble — pledging their lives, limbs and their sacred honor — so their descendants wouldn’t have to.

The same for the Great War for Emancipation, and all the other times in American history when people stepped forward as leaders in time of crisis. I’m sure they all would have preferred a life of quiet domesticity.

So here we are in April 2009. Our country faces a crisis caused by the unstoppable greed of the Big Union and Big Corporate interests that sponsor most of the corrupt politicians who run Washington, D.C.

This is not a crisis for a week, or a month, or a year. It is an over-reaching power grab of huge ambition. Those who prefer to live high off the hog of an extraordinarily large and intrusive federal government are doing everything they can right now to permanently cement into place government spending, procedures and policies that we will most likely never recover from.

You’ll pay for it. They’ll enjoy their federal government lifestyle.

It’s our turn to reach deep inside and come to the same degree of implacable commitment that our founding fore-fathers and fore-mothers once came to, in the face of the crisis it was their lot to live through.

We have been given a different crisis. It is the one we must confront.

In the last three weeks, Tea Party organizers around the country have shown a degree of generosity of spirit, endurance, honor, patience, and integrity that moves me to tears.

And yet, our battle has just begun.

What I wish each Tea Party organizer anywhere in the country, whether you’re putting together a small gathering of 100 or one of the large multi-thousand events, is to know that although you never expect this, you have become one in the chain of those who put themselves on the line for what America stands for.

“The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv’d them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas’d them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath’d to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. — Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance.