How did a Free People get here?

I remember –vaguely– the excitement, the anticipation, as the nation (and, indeed the world) breathlessly awaited for the Lunar Module door to open, for an astronaut to debauch from the tiny “porch”, and alight on the surface of the moon.

My brother had a “toy turtle” at the time, and I contracted salmonella from the little cutie. So, I was curled up with my barf-bucket, under the end-table, in the manner of six-year-olds. But, we all watched Walter Cronkite  for several hours on that July evening in 1969 with historic and wide-eyed excitement waiting, waiting, waiting for Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin to set foot on our nearest celestial neighbor.

A 39-year old American, standing on the surface of the Moon.

Mankind was forever changed by the simple, yet awe-inspiring, works of a Free People.

Many years later, I worked with a man named Mahendra who was a refugee of Adi Amin’s Rhodesia. He and his father ran one of three or four body shops in the entire country. At the time of the Lunar Landings, the only TV around was in a local restaurant, and he said people had walked for days to watch the coverage of Man Landing On The Moon.

“It looked like ghosts on the TV,” he said. But imagine: Walking for days to see the accomplishments of a Free People –and be awed.

A Free People put men on the moon.  They then produced the technology by which remote African villagers could watch it take place live, as it happened. And their nation, the Nation of a Free People, wasn’t even yet 200 years old.

As a Free People, We’ve written amazing works of philosophy that continue to guide us and govern us. We’ve won a dozen wars of Justice, not conquest. We’ve cured diseases that have plagued mankind since the dawn of reckoning. We tamed mountains, conquered illiteracy. We packed the churches we built with our own funds, and kept them viable until very recently without government support. We have invented a storehouse of modern marvels. We have verily transformed the way mankind lives.

America is an amazing, miraculous place.

And here we are, almost 45 years after Neil Armstrong –a single, individual American strolled around on the Moon– sitting on yet another set of pins and needles. But these are far more painful…

This time, we cower in fear in our anticipation. We’ve chewed our nails to the quick with worry over what another single American might do. We wait in our sweat, our worry, our dread foreboding.

How will a single, old man in a black robe vote?

Will Justice Anthony Kennedy allow us to be free, or will he enslave us to generations of darkness and federal coercion? One single man, in a far distant city, who has never met me, will never meet me, will decide if the Constitution means what it says about the sovereign individual, or not. And thus, Justice Kennedy will decide the fate of my family, my kin, my decedents for ages to come. Another small step for a man… right down the slippery slope.

And I never got to vote for him.

This is tyranny, plain and simple. Tyranny. How the hell did we get here?

America isn’t supposed to be like this. It just isn’t