Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price-- their lives.
Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated. Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.
The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that 248 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one's freedoms-- at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent-- is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.
In fact, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.
Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don't bear a startling resemblance to the abuses "we the people" are suffering at the hands of the American police state.
In the 248 years since early Americans first declared and eventually won their independence from Great Britain, "we the people" have managed to work ourselves right back under the tyrant's thumb.
Only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making. The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.
Given the fact that America is a relatively young nation, it hasn't taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.
Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.
It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government's power at the expense of individual freedoms.
The building blocks for the bleak future we're just now getting a foretaste of-- police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.-- were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that does not mean we should give up or give in or tune out.
Folks, if ever there were a time to declare our independence from tyranny, it's now.
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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.
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