The Invisible Crossroads

Crossroads.

1820 - The Missouri Compromise deferred war for 41 years, and then the debt came due.  Might not it have been better to fight the Civil War earlier, when the necessary surgery would not have been so costly and the wounds so deep?  Yet, the Civil War became an inevitable cataclysm because
a generation sought compromise at the expense of principle.  Behind the Compromise, the divide between the states grew greater, not less, until at last the pent-up pressure exploded into violence, division, and residual damage to our own best principles of equality that have lasted, albeit in diminishing degrees, even to the present day.

For students of history, the Civil War was not only a monolithic conflict over a single issue ("all men are created equal"); it was also the rending of an understanding among the first states that respected sovereign self-determination.  In its aftermath, the prospect of an all-powerful central government loomed large, and many of the secondary and tertiary effects feared by the clearest political minds of nation's Founding have come to fruition in a burdensome and unresponsive federal government that has come to resemble aspects of despotism.  There was a crossroads in 1820, but it was largely invisible.  That generation chose compromise, and could not foresee the terrible and tragic social and political consequences.

What lesson to draw?  Fellow Texans, we MUST NOT give in to the compromise of our principles.  We MUST NOT give in to the siren song of socialism, with all of its utopian - and demonstrably unachievable - promises.  We MUST NOT accept government healthcare.  We MUST NOT countenance the erosion of even the smallest promise of our Constitution.  Perhaps most importantly, we MUST NOT continue going forward with the thought that "nothing can be done," and the resulting sense of helplessness and apathy that such a thought engenders.  The continued compromise of individual liberties, of government takeover of private industry, of bowing down to agencies such as the EPA and IRS, of "looking away" as a corrupt Congress loses all sense of perspective, will, like the Missouri Compromise, only defer a great and horrific reckoning.  We must put people in Congress who will hold the line, no matter the political cost, in order to avoid a much more dangerous path that leads eventually - even if a hundred years from now - to violent confrontation.  (People will always yearn for freedom, and if sufficiently deprived of liberty, will resort to force to secure it; this, I believe, is an unchanging aspect of human nature.)

There is a great discussion going on about "working together across the aisle," "bipartisanship," and "polarization."  So the voter will know clearly:  I'll have no part of a philosophy that accepts the "managed decline" of America.  I'll not take part in mortgaging our children's future to disinterested, even antithetical, creditors.  I'll do everything within my power and position as a U.S. Representative to halt the growth and intrusive power of the federal government and return it to its Constitutional limits.  We have hard decisions to make, and I will not shy away from them.  Further, I will be a voice recalling us to the moral foundations that are prerequisites for the functioning of a free society.  No good person wants a country of corrupted morals to be powerful, even if that country is his own, because such a country will be incapable of bringing good to its neighbors around the world, and will at the same time be wholly capable of introducing wrongness of many kinds.

A primary election is coming, and it is an opportunity.  Your vote is YOUR vote - you can cast it how you wish.  No candidate is "inevitable."  You yourself, with your vote, will determine who wins.  Please, therefore, vote, and vote carefully.

Godspeed,

-w