If the Founding Fathers* were watching the election going on today, what would they be thinking? What would they think of a man who wants to put into place policies clearly and unquestionably contrary to the beliefs of the Founding Father’s and the ideals this very nation was founded on?

I imagine that if they were alive, they wouldn’t be very happy. Right now, they must be turning in their graves.

Neither current major political party adequately represents the Founding Father’s vision, but there is no doubt which side they would be rooting for if forced to pick one. If Washington, Jefferson, Maddison, Hamilton and all the other men who founded our nation were casting votes today they would be casting them for John McCain because of how fundamentally different their core principals—the principals our nation was founded on—are from those of the modern American Democratic Party.

I once heard a true story about a college professor and his daughter. One cold winter morning, the professor decided to take a walk around his neighborhood. He told his daughter, who wanted to walk with him, to get a jacket, which she refused to do so. After repeating his request several times, she continued to insist she didn’t need a jacket, and so they went on their walk.

A few blocks into the walk, however, the daughter began complaining about the cold. The professor, however, refused to cut the walk short or give his jacket to his daughter. Instead, they walked the rest of the way with her freezing as he explained that life is about choices, and that you are the victim of the choices you make.

Each one of the Founding Father’s would have applauded the professor in this story. He warned his daughter, but she refused to heed his advice and so she suffered the consequences of her mistakes, learning a valuable lesson in the process. But in modern times, rather than applause a story such as this one draws complaints of “child abuse” from neighbors or teachers who hear of it.

The America of Old was a society of personal responsibility, where you made your choices and accepted the responsibility for their results. But our society of today has become much different, it is one about holding other people responsible.

Imagine that the mortgage crisis of this year was playing out in the year 1800. Homeowners, who failed to read over their mortgages before signing them or had entered them without the means to pay them off suddenly found themselves being forclosed on. Meanwhile, the mortgage companies who made the bad loans and the investment banks were crying out for help as credit dried up? What would the Founding Fathers have done?

It’s quite clear what they would have done: They wouldn’t have lifted a finger. As Justice Casey Percell once beautifully said, “It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself.“ The Founding Fathers believed this to the core.

America, quite clearly, has become a nation of personal responsibility to one of a collective one, where people look to blaim anyone but themselves for whatever fate thrusts upon them.

Just recently when campaigning door to door in Toledo, Ohio, Barack Obama stumbled upon the doorstep of a man named Joe Wurzelbacher, now famously dubbed “Joe the Plumber.” When asked about his tax plans for small businesses, Obama said he wanted to “Spread the wealth around.”

Let me say that again: He said he wanted to “Spread the wealth around.”

Barrack Obama wants to take your hard-earned money and give it to somebody else because, in his view, they’ve been backhanded by life. He believes that some people just have bad luck and he just wants to give them “a chance to be successful.”

In the second paragraph of Declaration of Independence* the Founding Fathers say that Governments are instituted to secure the sacred rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and protect citizens against intrusions on our life and property. Interestingly, these are the very intrusions that are going to be happening if the Obama ticket enters the White House.

I can imagine readers now looking at that last two sentences and saying: “Certainly he wants to intrude on our property since hee wants to tax us more. But our lives?”

Think about it this way: A job is, at it’s core, basically your employer paying you in exchange for part of your life. So if Barack Obama feels he needs to tax you more, then he feels he has a right to part of your life beyond what the government feels it deserves already.

Right now this nation is on a tipping point, teetering over the abysses of opposing ideaologies. On one side of the fulcrum is the dream our founding father’s possessed for this country, one of freedom and personal responsiblitiy, and on the other lies the neosocialist dream of redistributed wealth, and “fairness.”

And right now the lever that is our nation is teetering dangerously toward the second view.

If, after all is said and done and the ballots counted and Barack Obama comes up the winner then we, the people of this nation, will soon be united (in a way Obama never imagined) seeing the last gasps of the American dream.

John C. Schneider

theweekendreview AT gmail.com

Just switch the AT to an @ and you can reach me.

*Notice I used “Founding Fathers,” not the new chic politically correct term “Founding Framers.” The Founding Fathers were the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. The Framers were the people who made frames for them after they were finished.

* Here it is, for those of you who haven’t seen it in a while. . . 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”