Two hundred thirty and six years ago our founding forebears risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to secure their liberty and bequeath it to their heirs.
So precious and fragile, they sought to protect it from every enemy and thief, be they foreign or domestic.
Time and again their inheritors were called upon to defend that treasured heirloom from enemies foreign with their labor, their ingenuity, and too often their blood.
To secure it from that most rapacious robber, ourselves, they again called upon their ingenuity and wisdom to devise a system of constitutional domestic government based upon limiting principles and the application of checks and balances.
The Constitution was intended as a shield against tyranny. A shield being preferable to other methods of defense. But no constitution, no matter how wise, can prevent a brutish people from cannibalizing its own liberty forever. By all accounts, ours has done better than most.
Today on the anniversary of our nation’s birth one cannot help but reflect upon the state of that treasure.
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