Endowed by Our Creator

America was strong because all Americans believed in America and the goals that it was aspiring to achieve. The United States of America was created to be a nation that promotes, foster, and nourishes the rights and freedoms of the individual. The government’s job was to help the individual to live his life according to his beliefs, values, dreams, and abilities. The Founding Fathers literary made this point in the second paragraph of The Declaration of Independence when they wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” In the sentence that comes next in this paragraph, the Founding Fathers clearly state the government’s role in helping the individual to exercise his “unalienable Rights.” They wrote “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”



Although most Americans haven’t memorized this second paragraph, most Americans understand that it essentially states that “Our individual rights come from our Creator ― our God. Government gets its power from us. In other words, the Government and its Officials ― including its Governors, State Officials, Congressmen, Senators . . . are our employees! It isn’t the other way around ― We don’t work for them; they work for us!

Most Americans also understand that we are human beings, which means that we are imperfect, and will be prone to making mistakes from time to time. In the past we tried to correct our mistakes, by following the trend started by the Founding Fathers; they created Amendments to The Constitution of the United States for the purpose of clarifying misconceptions concerning issues in The Declaration of Independence and correcting past mistakes concerning those individuals whose unalienable rights were not specifically addressed in The Declaration. We continue this trend of creating Amendments for the purpose of promoting the unalienable rights of the excluded. Our goal was “to make Government most responsible for promoting the rights of all people.” And most of us felt that our Government was moving in the right direction to achieving this goal.

Sometime, however, in the past three decades we reversed course. Instead of continuing down the path to equality, we did an about-face and started backwards to the inequality from which we came. And we also insured, as we traveled backwards, that many of our citizens, who had recently acquired their individual rights, were stripped of them.

This means that many Americans no longer believe in America and the goals that it was aspiring to achieve. More and more Americans no longer see the United States of America as a nation that promotes, foster, and nourishes their rights and freedoms, or a government that helps them to live their lives according to their beliefs, values, dreams, and abilities. Since America was strong because all Americans believed in America and the goals that it was aspiring to achieve, it is easy to see that we are becoming a weaker nation and it’s easy to see the cause of it.

The big questions in front of us are “What are we going to do about it?” and “What social and economic prices are we willing to pay for its Spiritual Rewards?