The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Present Crisis

Posted on | November 26, 2019 | Comments Off on The Present Crisis

 

“The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards. And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
“It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”
— Sam Adams, 1771

That warning from one of our nation’s greatest Patriot forefathers is quoted in the final chapter of my good friend Robert Belvedere’s new book, On the Causes and Effects of the Present Crisis in America.

Bob was kind enough to send me not one, but two copies — one for my brother Kirby — and I must say that I am impressed. The Present Crisis is a valuable book in that it looks beyond the day-to-day partisan conflicts that consume so much of our attention, bringing into view the deeper and more fundamental roots of our social disorder. The author writes in a deliberately old-fashioned style, recalling the 18th-century English prose of our Founding Fathers such as Sam Adams. The failure of our education system to teach America’s young people their own history is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that almost no one under 40 today knows anything about Sam Adams except as a popular brand of beer.

It could be argued that no one man was more responsible for inspiring our War of Independence than Sam Adams, whom Winston Churchill (in his History of the English Speaking Peoples) identifies as the foremost of American radicals during the years when our colonial ancestors began to resent the British Crown’s encroachment of their liberties. The case that Adams made (unfortunately one little appreciated by our ignorant youth) is that the rights which Americans were willing to fight and die for were not intellectual abstractions, but rather an inheritance their English forebears had bequeathed to them, rights won “with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood.” It is this “fair Inheritance” which recent generations have voluntarily forfeited in pursuit of theoretical notions of “equality” and “social justice.” But I digress . . .

Bob Belvedere’s book is one that I’m sure our readers will want to buy, perhaps as a gift for a young person who needs to cure their ignorance.




 

Category: Books, History

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