As he helplessly gave way to whatever fate would befall him, he looked out into the ensuing chaos and saw another man running at him with a baseball bat. Whoever was pulling Mason by the leg dropped it to take on the bat-wielding man, but he wasn’t alone. He had a friend come running up behind him. “That’s him, Smoka. Look at the gunshot wounds.”
Smoka hit the man with the bat a few times while the second assailant began kicking Mason in the ribs and abdomen. Mason was so out of it, all he could do was watch as his own consciousness faded in and out. His eyes were blurry, and he couldn’t make out the details of the men’s faces.
When Smoka was done beating the mystery man, he turned to face Mason. “You shouldn’t have interfered in my business.” Then he drew the ball bat over his head and brought it down across Mason’s forehead.
ORDER OATH TAKERS (FOUR-TIME BEST-SELLER)
ON OUR FORM OF GOVERNMENT
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence hang above my fireplace. I also keep a copy of these articles in my prep bag. They are very dear to me. Not only will I die for their preservation, but I will fight with every fiber in my being to ensure my children and your children grow up with individual freedoms. Not the freedoms elected to them by the majority, or a dictator, of sorts, but individual sovereign freedoms. This is where one may be confused regarding the current status of the United States.
Our country is currently running as a democracy. It is not written into the Constitution as such. This country was forged to be a republic. Even our Pledge of Allegiance is “ to the Republic for which it stands” (referring to the symbol of the US flag). In a republic, the individual American is sovereign to his/her own rights. Rights are vested with each and every individual American, equally. There should be no democracy among the citizens of the United States. In a democracy, the rights are vested in the majority. Where the majority dictate, the rights of the individuals in the minority do not apply. In a democracy, when the majority says “thus and such shall be your rights,” then those are the rights given to you.
Our Constitution contains a Bill of Rights built into it to insure an everlasting individual freedom. This is why it’s so important to protect, defend, and preserve the Constitution of the United States. I do not pretend to be a Constitutional professor. I’m not even a Constitutional senior lecturer; history shows that these titles don’t mean too much when a country is being managed by educated derelicts with such abbreviations following their names. That’s the beauty of the Constitution. It wasn’t written by the educated for the educated. It was written by patriots that dreamed about a country where every person could be free from an overreaching government, where the government would be the people. It was written by a thirty-three-year-old planter by the name of Thomas Jefferson. The context of the Constitution is in the history of its creation. It was affirmed and voted into writ by a people fresh from the bonds of tyranny. They saw how a king could become corrupted by power and they watched as it happened.
Though years of intercession to the king went unanswered, it became necessary to fight and die for a great cause. The Constitution was written to permanently eradicate tyranny and to give power to the people of its citizenry. It was written in a time when government was not made up of the people, but rather a government unto itself that was made up of people, but not for the people or by the people. Therein lay the corruptibility of the government. It was through this avenue that the people of the American colonies became victims of their government, and therein lay the reasons the very words were penned:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” —The Declaration of Independence, July 4 th, 1776
The oath you swore was to the Constitution. It was not to an evolving form of government. Over the past several decades, a representative democracy has been the norm, but it was not so in the beginning. One of the greatest concerns during the early convention meetings was securing individual freedoms. Therein is the importance of the Bill of Rights. There will be more on that later, but our oaths are to those laws of the Constitution that give rights to sovereign Americans. As oath takers, your job is to ensure that these rights are kept within the confines of the Constitution and not usurping it. It is to make sure no person, foreign or domestic, tramples them. This defense mechanism was built into the Constitution.
L. Douglas Hogan is a USMC veteran with over twenty years in public service. Among these are three years as a Marine Corps antitank infantryman, one year as a Marine Corps Marksmanship Instructor, ten years as a part-time police officer, and twenty years working in state government, doing security work and supervision. He enjoys section hiking the Appalachian Trail, camping, hanging out with his readers, and writing post-apoc books. He has been married over twenty-five years, has two children, and is faithful to his church, where he resides in southern Illinois.
After The Pulse (Book 1): Homestead Page 21
