While Evils Are Sufferable

No Independence Day is complete without a review of the Declaration of Independence. I make it a habit of reading this landmark document every July Fourth (actually, I read it more often than that but it is good to spend some time with it on this day as well). Recently, as I observe the many violations of our freedoms, I am drawn to a peculiar portion of the Declaration. The Founders penned:

Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by altering the forms to which they are accustomed.

While watching the Provo Freedom Festival parade this morning, I was handed a slip of paper by a charming young lady. The paper was an invitation to a so-called tea party, at which certain distinguished elected officials were slated to speak upon the current state of politics in our country. Since the first tea parties nearly three months ago, I have mused over the conduct of these protests. The tea party I attended was filled with weak, watery speeches by the very elected officials who have sought, even if merely ignorantly, the very usurpation they complained about. Attendance was grossly overestimated, and the enthusiasm of the crowd was weaker than the speakers. My thoughts reflected back in history to the real Tea Party, the one that played a direct hand leading into the Revolutionary War. Back then violence was employed to destroy property as a protest of grievious usurpations from the British crown on its citizens in the Americas. The Boston Tea Party was an act that stated, “these evils are no longer sufferable.” The Boston Tea Party came at the end of a long couple of decades in which Americans used non-violent methods in hopes of persuading their British brethren to mend the wrongs done to them. Americans loved their native land. Most had direct relatives still living in England. They wanted to remain loyal to their homeland and subject to its crown. But finally, enough become too much and those evils were no longer sufferable. This led to the Tea Party, the Declaration, and to a war to prove their independence.

Are the evils we suffer still sufferable? Glenn Beck prided himself and the recent tea parties as uniquely non-violent. In this respect, these tea parties were no tea parties at all, and revelations to the world that the evils suffered by the American people are still sufferable. And for that reason, I say we must work all the more diligently to “petition for redress in the most humble terms. … We must appeal to our Congressional brethren’s “native justice and magnanimity.”

I call upon elected officials everywhere to consider the choices laid before them and to recognize the destructive ends those decisions may have if made poorly. Theirs is the task of protecting the individual rights of man. I pray that through persuasion and long-suffering guidance they can right this renegade ship that is our federal government. I call upon them to resurrect the shambled document that once was our Constitution. That this country may rise from the ashes back to its once great stature, and that this may be done through peaceful, rational means before it is too late and can only be saved with the blood of some future generation. Save this nation before evils become insufferable.