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Reclaiming our country.(THE LAST WORD)(Essay)
Although our nation's Founders did not have the benefits of the Internet for communications between them, they certainly did extensively employ the "social networking" of their day to secure our rights and freedoms. Committees of Correspondence were established throughout the American colonies in the 1770s to provide a means for the widely scattered colonists to collaborate in preserving their historic freedoms from the increasingly tyrannical actions of the British government. Relying on handwritten letters carried by couriers on horseback or aboard ships, these committees served to rally the colonists in support of certain causes and to facilitate planning for collective action.
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We have good news and bad news about the changes that have taken place in the two centuries since the Committees of Correspondence played a leading role in preserving our freedom. First the good news. Today we have the Internet to provide virtually instantaneous communication between individuals and groups throughout our nation and the world. Wonderful. Now for the bad news. Our historic freedoms are no longer threatened by a distant imperial government in London, but instead the problem is now the loss of freedom from the many unconstitutional actions of our federal government. This situation has come about due to the influence of powerful interest groups on Congress, the only branch of the U.S. government constitutionally authorized to make federal laws.
It is fairly easy to develop a vision for changing this situation by creating an even greater influence on Congress on behalf of preserving freedom by insisting that our congressmen adhere to the U.S. Constitution. However, even though the general vision is easy to come by, effectively implementing it has been a challenge.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations that claim to be working on various aspects of this vision of freedom. They attempt to rally sufficient grass-roots influence on Congress and the states to prevail on their legislative agenda. However, on balance, the forces of freedom are not winning. Why not? Why are Americans with their great love for defending freedom and the Constitution losing their freedom through Congress' lack of adherence to the Constitution?
The obvious answer is that the organizations and individuals promoting freedom under the Constitution are too splintered to generate sufficient influence on Congress to ...
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