Yesterday, we celebrated what has become a farce, a mere shadow of what it meant in the twilight of our nation.

The American Revolution was led by our first President and it was started because of an over reaching and oppressive government which taxed with no redress and imposed unfair laws, duties and levies on the colonies.

In 1763, King George III of England signed into law the Proclamation of 1763 prohibiting any English settlement west of the Appalachian mountains and requiring those already settled in those regions to return east in an attempt to ease tensions with Native Americans. This was only the beginning. Only one year later, the English Parliament passed the Sugar Act to try and offset the war debt brought on by the French and Indian War and to help pay for the expenses of running the colonies and newly acquired territories. This act increases the duties on imported sugar and other items such as textiles, coffee, wines and indigo (dye). It doubles the duties on foreign goods reshipped from England to the colonies and also forbids the import of foreign rum and French wines. Ha… one reason for the Revolutionary war was because England taxed booze… and to think, we’re now under a far more oppressive taxation than were the colonists.

That same year, the English Parliament passed a measure to reorganize the American customs system to better enforce British trade laws, which had often been ignored by the colonists. They established a court in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have jurist prudence over all of the American colonies in trade matters. Then, the Currency Act prohibited the colonists from issuing any legal tender paper money. This act threatens to destabilize the entire colonial economy of both the industrial North and agricultural South, thus uniting the colonists against it.

Only one year after some of the heavies levies and duties had been imposed on the colonists, the English Parliament rubs salt in the fresh wounds by passing the Stamp Act, which imposes the first direct tax on the American colonies, to offset the high costs of the British military organization in America. This is the first actual tax the Americans would have to pay, and one of the primary impetus for the Revolutionary war… they had a war over taxes.

Ten years go by with more taxes, enforced by force and threat of force. Ten years until the tax on tea causes the whole system to break down and the colonists to turn to open rebellion.

The first shots of the Revolutionary war were fired in 1775 and we never looked back.

But what do we have now? What have we become? I’d say that we no longer have a fair or just government, and that the second amendment is in place to insure that ‘We The People’ can take back our country from those who impose their will upon us.

There are those who would argue that calling for an open rebellion is taking the law into our own hands. Well I ask of you all; what did Patrick Henry, George Washington, Sam Adams and John Hancock do? They and others with them took the law into their own hands. Who is the law? Lawyers? I don’t think so. We are the law, those of us who agree to obey it. But if we see the Constitution of the United States of America being trampled underfoot, are we going to just stand there and try and argue with lawyers who already interpret anything they want into the fabric of the “living/breathing” document? You can’t win an argument when your opponent uses the argument that the Constitution means whatever the best arguer says it means.

We can’t win that argument, and like our forefathers, we need to stop arguing and force the Kings in Washington to obey the US Constitution as written or leave this country.

President’s Day my ass…. It’s more like King’s Day all over again.

In the immortal words of Patrick Henry, Give me Liberty or Give me Death!!!