by Steve Osborn

"Other misfortunes may be borne, or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it; if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it; if it desolate and lay waste our fields, still, under a new cultivation they will grow green again and ripen to future harvests. It were but a trifle if the walls of yonder capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and its gorgeous decorations be all covered by the dust of the valley; all these might be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of demolished government?"

"Who shall rear again the well proportioned columns of constitutional liberty? Who shall frame together the skillful architecture which unites national sovereignty with State rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No, gentlemen, if these columns fall they will be raised not again. Like the Coliseum and the Parthenon they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them than were ever shed over the monuments of Roman or Grecian art; for they will be the remnants of a more glorious edifice than Greece or Rome ever saw, the edifice of Constitutional American liberty."

The above words were spoken by the statesman and orator, Daniel Webster, at a dinner celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of George Washington's birth, February 22, 1832. In the ensuing one hundred seventy-three years, our constitutional government has weathered many challenges, but has endured and grown, until now.

The framers of our Constitution were educated men who knew of the failures of former governments and they carefully built in the checks and balances that would protect ours from the same errors. They had seen the misery and woes of theocratic governments, where the church ruled and made a hell on earth for those who questioned its edicts, so they decreed a separation of church and state.

They were well acquainted with the evils of a controlled press so they guaranteed freedom of speech and of the press. They separated government into three independent branches, to act as checks and balances, to see that no one party or group could seize the government and turn it into a dictatorship. Our constitution was a model for many emerging nations, who also were acquainted with dictatorships and greed, and wanted a change. For a long time, our nation was a role model, respected around the world.

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When we look about us now, what do we see? A nation where one group has seized control of the executive, the legislature, and much of the judiciary. A nation in which science, freedom of thought and expression, and morality are all increasingly controlled by a very narrow-minded fundamentalist church group. A new theocracy is aborning.

A nation where the press is increasingly shown to be a propaganda arm of the government. All power and wealth is accumulating in the hands of a very small group of businessmen and corporations. All freedoms increasingly restricted in the name of security. That is the definition of Fascism.

I fear that Webster's pronouncement is coming to pass and the great experiment is coming to an end. The world is rapidly turning into an Orwellian clash of bullies where the people are worth nothing more than the minimum their labor may bring. Life will again become "nasty, brutish and short."

"We the People" are the only ones who can take our government back and, to do so, we must put aside pettiness, greed and lust for power. We must work single-mindedly to restore the Constitution and Bill of Rights, intact, to the halls of government.

To fail means a continuing descent of the United States into Fascism, empire building, endless wars of conquest, and arbitrary imprisonment, poverty, hunger and sickness for the common man.