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Todd's Take

My friends, I handed the mic to my friend Gary Varvel today, and he used the moment to ask a question worth sitting with: what will it take for this country to make it another 250 years?

Gary opened with something Abraham Lincoln said when he was only 28 years old, decades before he ever set foot in the White House. Lincoln warned that America's greatest danger would never come from a foreign army — no power on earth could march in and take us by force. If this nation ever fell, he said, it would be because we tore it down ourselves, from the inside.

Gary tied that warning straight to Jesus's parable of the wheat and the weeds — the enemy doesn't storm the field, he sneaks in while everyone's asleep and plants weeds among the good seed. Prosperity has a way of making people drowsy. And apathetic. We've spent generations teaching kids how to get ahead, and not nearly as much time teaching them why any of it matters, or what holds a free people together in the first place.

John Adams said our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and totally inadequate for the government of any other. George Washington called religion and morality the indispensable supports of political prosperity. Both men understood something we forget at our own risk: our republic only works if the people running it can govern themselves first. When we stop doing that, something else moves in to do it for us.

Gary walked through how patiently that shift has been made — in our schools, our media, our entertainment, even our courts and our churches. Different people, different tactics, same target: change what a generation believes about truth and family and freedom, and the politics eventually follow on their own.

We cannot expect any politician to walk through that metaphorical door to fix it. Diagnosing the rot is the easy part. Renewal starts somewhere much less glamorous — truth, repentance, prayer, and people willing to actually show up instead of just watching from the stands.

We just turned 250. Whether we see 500 depends less on Washington than it does on whether average, everyday Americans wake up and get in the game.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

The Battleground for Government

Gary's closing line — get out of the bleachers — points straight at one of our eight cold civil war battlefronts: Government.

The whole American experiment rests on a strange idea: that government is legitimate only because the people governed agree to it, not the other way around. Most of human history ran the opposite direction — a ruler decided what the people could do. We flipped that on its head, and it only holds up as long as citizens actually show up to do the holding.

"Getting out of the bleachers" isn't just a nice phrase. It's the difference between a republic and a spectator sport. Register. Vote. Show up to your local party meeting. Run for school board, city council, or county commissioner if you have to. Rights come from God, not government — but nobody protects them for you while you're watching from the stands.

The line between government as the servant of a self-governing people and government as the thing running the show isn't drawn once and left alone. It's redrawn every time enough citizens either show up or stay home.

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Quote of the Day

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At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.

Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 1838

Stack of Stuff

Lincoln's full 1838 Lyceum Address — the danger-from-within line Gary quoted is even sharper read in full context.
Gary Varvel's syndicated editorial cartoons — his day job at Creators Syndicate, worth a regular look.
Matthew 13:24-30 — the parable of the wheat and the weeds Gary referenced today.