Posted by
LadyLiberty on Thursday, June 18, 2009 2:02:32 AM
Blog 75: The Exception to the Exceptions is the Rule
(Tu and Raina have returned to work at Shih & Herbary and Gymnaces in Michigan. Ann is on maternity leave and summer vacation while Link and Curtis manage their web mastery work by remote with frequent Blackberry grabs. The three have remained to assist with the planning and building of the ranch at Rock of Liberty through Father's Day weekend.
More of the Keepers will drive in afterward to pitch in with the huge building blitz modeled on Habitat for Humanity's Builders' Blitz from Wake County. Timeus is reviewing the plans for the next month as they all tour the surveyed land.)
Timeus: We can thank Abraham Lincoln for many things, and the homesteading option in the tradition of Jefferson's yeoman farmer was one of them. Plantation slavery was, indeed, threatened by free farmers since freed slaves qualified. When the South seceded in '61, the resistance to the Homestead Act left with it. Lincoln pushed it through in '62, and Mother's great-great grandfather was one of the claim stakers.
Link: Mother-Sister! I hardly knew ye! Just passin' through all these years?
Freiah: Well, no. My people weren't freed slaves, but my great-great grandfather did bring up a slave through John Brown's tunnel in Nebraska City and his subsequent family staked a claim thereabouts. I think they auctioned off their accumulated section sometime around the 20's and the descendents, who had become quite well-to-do, ventured further east to make their fortunes in the automobile industry just then opening up in Detroit.
Olam: On the "Tin Lizzie" line.
Freiah: I think one of the offspring was the first black male engineering student to graduate from University of Michigan, or some such distinction.
Link: Well, the family fared well; the automobile, not so much.
Lily: Oh, Ford'll do just fine if they hold to their free market line.
Timeus: Well, that assembly appears to have hit bottom. If you've closely followed the downhill trajectory of Motown, you may wonder if your surveyor's compass lost its magnetic bearings a while back. Look for yourselves. North is South now. (Steps aside for all to sight the landscape)
Link: (Peering and sighing) Ah, no worries, Yank. Obama's Commicsar has taken care of the unions, the Chicago Way. The long arm of the strong man now makes law.
Timeus: And more law and more law...
Lily: And all of them exceptions to the original contract. But ordered liberty, private property, contract law and Constitutional protections were all examples of America's revolutionary exception to the old world's anarchy and tyranny.
We've labored under 100 years of meddling exceptions to our exceptionalism. But the exception to the exceptions is the rule. And the rule is the Natural law and order of liberty.
Lily: Which reminds me! Did you all take your Democracy challenge? The winners are in--and Zambia's was good, but I didn't have the video capability. So I could only text my answer to "Democracy is..."
Democracy is your God-given pilgrimage
to the public square from a fork in the road.
One route is marked Rule of Law; the other, Rule of Man.
Liberty takes the former, tyranny the latter.
But both routes lead to the same public square
where the over-arching truth eyed your journey.
Olam: All right, you've set your sights. And we know that they are in line with the great vision of human beings who've come before. Not just my Anglo-Saxon ancestors, but all the ethnic and genetic traces of liberty across the human heart...
Lady Liberty: ...and from your mouth to God's ears.
Olam: And the mouths of Moses, Aristotle, Confucius and King Cyrus.
Timeus: So now like Reagan, Lincoln and our Founders, in the spirit of the carpenter's tasks, we will measure, mark, cut and join.
Link: Well, the protestors are saying they want freedom and honest elections. Looks like their marchers don't like "partial recounts" or Acorn-style nut cases anymore than our lovers of liberty and the rule of law. We won't wish the Chicago Way or Gorelioni's Florida on them, but we'll both have to march much farther backward to go forward with our fathers' history.
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." --Thomas Jefferson
Our president is not yet possessed of an American sensibility or our surveyor's compass. And his training has taught him not to meddle with mad mullahs and theocracies, but rather the free market and our Constitutional republic. So we will make use of those bleeding borders and some all-American orienteering.