I just watched a documentary on Holocaust survivors and it struck me how easily we forget (or never knew to begin with) the lessons of history. Those survivors will never forget, but that generation is almost gone, and their vigilant cries are fading. But we have always believed it important to educate our young about that history and its lessons.
But our public schools have slipped, and those lessons traded for others. At best, our public school system has become just another example of incompetent government bureaucracy riddled with union inefficiency. At worst, the public school unions have become symbiotic with the Democratic Party, trading votes for benefits, and dumbed our kids down while elevating issues of teachers benefits.
This is the historical lesson we have lost: A powerful government is a tyrannical government. Our Founding Fathers granted only specifically enumerated powers to the federal government, and all other powers to the states. They enumerated specific God-given and inalienable personal rights - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, plus Constitutionally-derived rights such as property rights and due process. They were well-educated students of history and the nature of man and they KNEW that the only way to maintain a just government and civil society was to limit federal powers. They also knew that if governmental powers expanded to provide for our comfort and personal welfare, that it would necessarily erode our personal rights, and if that happened, a power-hungry madman would inevitably step into the void created by that power and bring tyranny down on our heads.
This is the price we pay for comprehensive federally-supplied comfort. We give up our personal rights. It is inevitable, and it has already begun. But because youngsters are no longer being taught about the role of tyranny throughout history, they do not see the threat. And so their minds are instead filled with warnings against those who would push them out of the comfort zone that has been drawn around them by the increasingly powerful government and into the real world. This is a warning to the spoiled generation - there is an egregious price to pay for what you have been taught that you deserve. Nothing is free.
John House
Belpre
