Everyone who has ever attended third grade knows the popular chant meant to shut down dissent: “The Majority Rules.”
What most of us never actually learn is the totality of both the quote and its intent, as dreamt, written and stated by Thomas Jefferson (Google him).
In 1801, in his First Inaugural Address, President Jefferson said, “All . . . will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect and to violate would be oppression.”
Put simply and famously, “The majority rules, with the consent of the minority.” In other words, a democracy only works when the losing side acknowledges that they have lost the fight and that while they disagree with the outcome, they will maintain the fabric of the civilized society by acquiescing to the rule of the majority.
Famous examples of the opposite, thus, the minority not consenting and ultimately affecting change, litter the American historical landscape, most notably in the case of the Civil Rights Act. Prior to 1960, the majority of Americans, 100 years after the beginning of the Civil War, still believed that blacks were second class citizens and, amongst many other things, did not deserve equal rights, protections and freedoms. The majority ruled. The minority, however, was no longer willing to consent. And so they embarked on a decade long battle to change the majority opinion, ultimately culminating not in a Supreme Court of 9 overlords changing the law in America, but rather changing the majority opinion of the country.
As the new movie “Selma,” blasphemously omits from its telling of the story, it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson who famously guided Martin Luther King to use the media to his advantage and show horrific images of blacks being denied basic human rights in America. The collaboration between Johnson and King shifted popular opinion in America, as Johnson predicted it would, and by the time the Civil Rights Act was presented to congress, the majority of America demanded it be passed. The minority had affected change, for they no longer consented.
Today, the minority rules America, and the majority neither consents nor, quite candidly engages or does anything about it.
For years, many of you have demanded I provide you some sort of hope as it relates to the clear decay of our nation, its culture and its society. Today I bring you some, without a promise that it will ever see itself to fruition.
It does not take a genius to recognize that the minority rules this nation. From our laws to our education system to our fellow citizens’ behavior, wildly unpopular views are allowed to dominate. To list them all would be folly, but some obvious examples are as follows:
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The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose zero tolerance rules in schools, yet they exist and are enforced in almost every single one
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The overwhelming majority of Americans support a parent’s right of use corporal punishment and spanking as forms of discipline against their children, yet scores of American adults are charged with crimes and placed under the scrutiny of their local Child Protective Services Departments for far less.
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The overwhelming majority of Americans opposed the total caving into threats which surrounded the release of the movie “The Interview.” Yet we ran and hid. Releasing it weeks later, on a very limited scale is the epitome of too little, too late.
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The overwhelming majority of Americans favor jobs for their fellow man over the attempts by man to control nature. When farmers lose ranches to protect a Smelt Fish, lumberjacks lose homes to protect spotted owls and thousands remain out-of-work while projects such as the Keystone Pipeline are held up to protect land that doesn’t need protecting, people seethe. And yet it continues.
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The overwhelming majority of Americans have no interest in hybrids, electric cars and similar vehicles designed to allegedly save the environment. Americans want cars they like to look at, like to drive and are attracted to, yet we mandate the very making of what no one wants. No demand? No problem! We’ll create the supply anyways!
In an attempt to summarize, the following still remains true: The overwhelming majority of Americans still just want to be left alone, offered an equal and fair opportunity (with no guarantee of success), live in a strong and courageous nation, and be allowed to live their lives, with the expectations that others will do the same. Doesn’t that sound like fantasyland today?
Most recently and notably, there have been a few wonderful examples of the minority ruling. Most Americans were completely and totally calm and uninterested by the hysteria portrayed by the alleged incoming threat of the Ebola virus. By wide margins, most of us were very aware that there was no threat at all to our country and remains none, but that is certainly not what drove public policy and the media narrative. We wasted hundreds of millions of dollars to stop a non-threat while being inundated with stories of scared Americans which actually represented 1% of our population. And yet we allowed it, and it happened, for the minority ruled and we looked the other way.
Today, a fractionally small portion of society, more angry than ever before but equally as unrepresentative of our views as the Occutard Movement was, is ruling. The “Hands up, I’m a Moron who can’t breathe,” crowd is being allowed to do everything from drive public policy to disrupt public events to stop traffic, based on total lies and fabrications of events. Because we, the overwhelming majority, remain crippled and scared to intervene.
So here is your hope; America is still America, though it is disappearing quickly. There are fewer and fewer of us every day who believe mightily in the nation and its ideals, but we are still the dominant thought in this country. The question that lingers is when, or whether, we will find again our voice and our courage and demand that the minority no longer be allowed to rule.
A decade of ignoring personal responsibility and allowing political correctness to reach chilling levels wasn’t enough to mobilize the majority.
An attack on our nation 15 years ago followed by stunningly horrific handlings of two major wars and the total abandoning of our troops in every way wasn’t enough to mobilize the majority.
An imminent threat to our nation via the (literally) most lenient, lax, and essentially, non-existent immigration enforcement policy on the globe, has not been enough to mobilize the majority.
What will it take? I’m not sure. I’ve often hypothesized that if the minority comes after something Americans hold so dear that they will finally rise up and say “enough,” yet I have watched over the last many years as the minority thought in this nation has taken away vast amounts of our freedom, choice, individuality, and security. They have infringed upon our children and how we raise them, and they have attacked and encroached upon our rights to bear arms in alarming ways. While we have pushed a little and avoided total abdication of our remaining freedoms and liberty, we have hardly awaken.
What will it take? 9/11 didn’t do it. Abusing our nation’s soldiers hasn’t done it. Embarrassing ourselves to the world through both stupid arrogance (Bush) and stunning weakness (Obama) hasn’t done it.
What will it take? I don’t know and I’m a little afraid to find out. I just hope that when the time arrives, it isn’t too late for the majority to still rule.