The Last American
I originally posted this at the Black Man With A Gun website on May 3, 2018, and I’d like to share it again here to launch the week in which we celebrate 243 years of American independence. Despite the somewhat gloomy tone in the beginning, I want to emphasize that this is an optimistic post, and I hope that you will see this when you read it. This is because America is bigger than geography. America is an idea…an idea that has existed forever and can never die. But to realize its full potential, we cannot forget that it is an idea worth fighting for. Please read on about…
The Last American
It isn’t me. It isn’t you. The last American hasn’t been born yet.
It is certainly easy to get down on the future of the nation known as the United States of America, and there is plenty to worry about. We live in a time of weaponized government agencies and regulators, seemingly more interested in putting citizens in their place…underneath the boot of the ruling class…than fulfilling their Constitutional duty to preserve the rights and freedoms of those citizens. Political opponents use the machinery of a massive federal government to investigate each other and leverage the justice system as a tool of overthrow to subvert the will of the people.
Down? Perhaps. But never out.
I have only been alive for 56 years…a blink in the timeline of the United States…and yet in my lifetime I have seen Americans gradually but steadily turned from citizens into subjects. Serfs destined to do no more than to pay taxes in service of the Deep State, with no apparent way out. There seems to be no realistic way to turn the tide back towards the free nation that the Founders envisioned and made real.
It was a Great Experiment, the greatest the world had ever seen. And it still is, even as it declines. You see, America was founded as the first nation in history which was constituted on an idea that men could…and should…rule themselves. An idea that men could…and should…live free, as God intended. An idea that men could…and should…form consensual governments to preserve those freedoms.
An idea.
But from this, we should take heart. Because no matter how dark things may appear, the truth is that America has always existed. Long before 1781, there was an America. Since the beginning of the human race, there has been an America. Heck, ten thousand years ago, there was a caveman squatting by the fire with the idea, “Why do we always have to do whatever Og says?” That was an American. Back in the 70’s, there was an inmate in a Soviet gulag with the idea, “This is not how it’s supposed to be.” That was an American. Right now, there is a prisoner in a North Korean labor camp who knows…knows…with every fiber of his being, that he is meant to be free. That’s an American.
An American is anyone who believes in the idea that this nation was built upon. They don’t even have to live within our borders, as long as they hold that idea. Live that idea. Love that idea.
I try to remember this whenever I become discouraged. When the news of the day makes me fear for my country, I draw strength from the reality that America can never die. Never. Because America is not a place…it is an idea. And as long as there is a single individual on this planet who holds to the idea of America…then America lives on.
We may be down, but we are not out. Throughout the course of human history, there has always been at least one individual clinging to an idea of liberty. There has always been…and always will be…someone who holds to an idea that one man was not meant to bow to another. There will always be one more individual who believes in that idea, and that one individual, that last individual…that last American…has not been born yet.
