The Founding? Move Along Folks NOTHING To See There. Onward Progress!

By Shelli Dawdy

This is part one of a two part piece.

The Lincoln Journal Star featured a piece in their Independence Day edition entitled “Whose Side Are the Founding Fathers On?” The piece was written with a bottom-line message: there’s no clear answer. It’ll be a topic of perpetual debate.

According to the article, the Founders were shrewd politicians who cobbled together a bunch of compromises to solve the problems of their day. The thinly veiled subtext is that there was nothing special about the founding of America, it has no relevance today, and in fact, its basis was morally murky because slavery was accepted.

The Founding? Move along, folks, NOTHING to see there.

Perhaps, the worst thing about the article is its “hard-sell” on the notion that the basic philosophies influencing the Founding are so very arguable. It will always be a source of perpetual debate to which there can never be any clear answers.

The meaning of the Founding? Move along, folks – it’s a muddle.

We must move along. The progress of history demands it.

The Founding? According to the LJS article…you could think on it forever, and get no clear answers

Of course, this point of view can be as seemingly inane as what I’m finding to be frequent these days – a truth seeking conversation with a person 25 years old or younger. They almost always end with such statements as, “What is truth?” There’s never a clear answer. Some people are motivated to regard the Founding as Version 1.0 Beta of a political software program that’s on Version 25 and the hardware’s changed. It’s the same thinking that the only good books were written in the last two years. Wig-wearing white men and their ideas from over two hundred years ago have gone the way of the 8-track tape.

Too many with this “move-on” mentality are those who’ve held power in federal, state, and local governments for far too long. It’s a point of view that demands progress.  In order to progress, we must move beyond those dated documents formulated via the oh-so-familiar sausage factory of compromise by politicians whose morality, ala slavery, was perhaps even more questionable than the politicians of our day.

If we can relegate the Founders, and far more importantly, the results of their efforts – our Declaration of Independence and Constitution – to the ash heap of history, then we can really make some progress.

Whether the object is to have the matter forever relegated to perpetual debate, have our politics deemed sufficiently upgraded, or to remove obstructions to progress,  people with these points of view roll out a familiar list of arguments. Prime among them is ensuring that people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams are all designated at best to be flawed yet shrewd politicians, at worst, immoral slavery proponents. Another argument made is the assertion that spirituality had no place in the Founding. And yet another is totally muddling up the timelines and facts of history.

To be continued. The next part of this piece will further explore arguments used to tear down America’s Founders and Founding.

Stubborn_Facts

Shelli Dawdy is first and foremost the mother of three children whom she has taught at home via the classical method since removing her children from school in 2001. During her early years as a homeschool mother, she worked part-time as a freelance writer. Born and raised in the Iowa, Shelli and her husband moved to the state of South Dakota in 1997, attracted to its more limited government and friendly tax environment. In 2006, Shelli and her family relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska, when her husband’s employer offered a new position. She took a break from work and politics for a time, recognizing the need to focus solely on her childrens’ schooling with two now of high school age. Distressed by many things she was witnessing on the national political scene and disillusioned about the Republican Party, she decided to start writing again, this time online. Motivated to get involved with others at the grassroots level, she networked with activists on the social media tool, Twitter. She was involved in organizing the first tea party rallies inspired by Rick Santelli’s “rant” on CNBC in February 2009. Recognizing that activism should generate on the local level, she founded Grassroots in Nebraska in March of 2009. The group’s mission is a return to Constitutional, limited government, according to its original meaning. While the group has held several tea party rallies, it’s focus is to take effective action. Among its many projects, GiN successfully coordinated testimony for the hearing of the Nebraska Sovereignty Resolution, networked with other groups to ensure a large show of public support at the hearing, and coordinated follow up support to ensure its passage in April 2010. While working to build up GiN throughout 2009, she was asked to work as writer and producer of the documentary film, A New America, which lays out how Progressivism is responsible for how America has moved away from its Constitutional roots. You can see more of her work on Grassroots in Nebraska (GiN) and StubbornFacts