(The following address was first given to the Plano American Legion on January 26th, 2014, for the American Legion Oratorical Contest, where it won local and district honors; it was given again on March 1st at the Peoria Civic Center, where it took 4th place in in its division in the semi-final round of the State competition).
My fellow Americans, good afternoon;
Recently, when asked after a reading of Pericles’ Funeral oration, his address to Athens at the close of the Peloponnesian War, to ponder whether the state exists to serve the citizen, or if that arrangement is really meant to be the other way around, I found that I disagree with the premise of the question: in reality, all individuals must serve their country in some way, even if not compelled to do so or done directly through state machinery. The question is the degree to which the individual should be compelled to serve their state and the degree to which the state should be expected to serve its people.
In nations like those dominated by figures such as (to cite examples relevant to the our contemporary time period) Arab Ba’athist strongmen of the likes of Saddam Hussein for decades in Iraq, or the multi-generational rule of the Syrian Assad family, the individual is compelled to submit himself to his rulers, or else face virtually any consequence that the regime could possibly seek to pursue against them. How does such a ruling party serve its subjects? This question is much easier to answer: it simply doesn’t. Rather, this state leaves its people living in squalor while it occupies its time with matters it finds much more pressing, namely gaining, maintaining, and expanding power, notably through means like war and genocide, both along ethnic or religious lines (the Sunni Hussein and his Kurdish rivals) and along national lines (the Iraqi Hussein and the Iranians). As enlightened Westerners, we have the inclination to see this as ethically and morally reprehensible and to recognize such an arrangement by one word: dictatorship.
The American system, however, is framed so as to attempt to avoid the known flaws of top-down government, and as such is built around the mankind’s natural order of liberty in nature. In Federalist 51, Madison, writing as “Publius,” argues in his “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition” passage, the “if men were angels” quote, that in framing good government, “the greatest of all reflections on human nature,” “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
In a sense, this line of thinking, that the people must serve as both their own leaders and as a check on their leaders, can be condensed into President Lincoln’s famous “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, which brings us back around to our original thesis. In order for the free state to exist and function properly, the citizen must serve it (“of the people, by the people”), and in return the state serves the citizen (“for the people”).
Hamilton (also under the pseudonym Publius) writes that “the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interests can never be separated;” Government, in other words, exists for the purpose of maintaining order in its jurisdiction, and in the more perfect state, to protect the natural, unalienable rights of the people, as they are outlined by the natural law, Jefferson’s “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” (the Constitution, as outlined in its artfully crafted preamble, works to achieve these exact ends). By maintaining law and order, the strong and essential trunk from which other branches may sprout, the state successfully fulfills its duty to serve the citizen (again, “for the people”).
But someone must go about the business of defining what the law should be, and still more people are required to go about the business of enforcing this law, and maintaining the state’s sovereignty in relations with the various other sovereigns that together make up the nations of the globe. As a magnificent lens through which we may view the intentions of the Founders, the Constitution’s aforementioned artfully crafted preamble not only sets forth these very same objectives—“establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence”—as the basis for the legitimate functions of government, but also establishes who should be responsible for maintaining these conditions: in big letters, “We The People,” or the citizens themselves. Together, as a collective of citizens acting as “We The People”, the lawmakers, law enforcers, and the military that serves our nation, make up Lincoln’s “of the people.”
Not all must, however, serve in any public office to serve the state, and most do not. But that does not mean that it is not within all of our individual powers to serve our state, and our services do not necessarily have to be filtered through the machinery of the state. In fact, the first and foremost thing you can do for your nation is rather simple, and George W. Bush said it quite well: “I encourage you all to go shopping more.” Though it sounds silly, almost ridiculous in is simplicity, the larger point he is trying to make is that if we can’t serve our nation any other way, the very least we can do is to do whatever we can to help drive our nation’s economic growth. And of course, not all money that we bring in can be spent as we desire: we all must pay out to that most despicable of things, taxes, so that our government can, in theory, afford to properly maintain law and order, and thus complete the great circle that is the relationship between the citizen and the state.
But, arguably more important to that, is the one service to the government that we are so lucky to be able to perform; a service that in actuality may be construed as a service truly to ourselves: the vote. In order to achieve and maintain a government of and for the people, it must also be composed “by the people,” by ballot in election. And with the people’s power to vote, to choose their leaders, to decide their own future, Lincoln’s Great Triangle of “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” is thus complete, and all debts of service between the citizen and his state are finally paid in full.
Thank you very much, and God bless the United States.
-Mitch Carter is an Illinois State Scholar and an Associate Member of the Kendall County Young Republicans. He blogs at CartersCornerPR.blogspot.com.
CartersCornerPR@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment