Special Bulletin 10-2011

     It was Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets, the day I first heard North Carolina Democratic Governor Bev Perdue suggest that constitutional elections should be suspended. The reason being floated for suspending the elections was so that politicians could concentrate on the seriousness of the national problems rather than putting effort into being reelected. Even to suggest such an idea is chilling and ought to be sobering. While it is not unexpected, considering the people who are currently in power, it is nonetheless disturbing.

     This is nothing to joke about. In the first few months of the present administration, many conversations were already being held about the next election and the presidential election of 2012. I recall hearing one prophetic voice, whom I have a very high regard for, state: “We need to pray that there will be an election in 2012!” And so I have been and will continue to pray.

     The trouble is that there are those who agree with the Governor. The President, for one, has in at least two public addressees suggested that he would like to suspend Congress and just run things by executive order (dictatorial decree). He has done exactly this in many cases already. Daniel Webster warned, “The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power.”

     Our country and our individual liberties are in more danger and under more sinister attack than ever before in history. Those who helped to create the serious problems with which we are now faced are suggesting that they not have the added pressure of the possibility of being replaced so they can concentrate on “fixing” the situation. Politicians are a unique lot. They are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign as the answer to the problem. Albert Einstein famously said, “You can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” If anything, floating the idea of early elections to vote the people out who have done so much damage to our Republic in such a short period of time might actually be a popular suggestion! That’s only a joke.

     Necessity has been used by many tyrants throughout history to usurp the liberty and property of citizens. Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin all centralized power this way. Now I want to be clear and on the record that I am not comparing Obama to Hitler. Hitler was wildly popular when he usurped power. Obama is not. Yet there are other means by which power can be usurped and concentrated—a declared state of emergency, civil unrest, and martial law are only a few of them.

     Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning, but without understanding.”

     Famous British Prime Minister, William Pitt, put it this way, “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

     In response to Governor Perdue’s comment, Canadian journalist Judi McLeod wrote, “Now, when we have a narcissistic Obama plunging in the polls, a Democrat governor in North Carolina is pushing the envelope for suspending elections and covering up a notion she dropped a bombshell by claiming she was only using hyperbole to make a point for a Rotary Club. If the election were held tomorrow, Obama would go down in a landslide strikingly more humiliating than the shellacking he and his party got—and never got over—in the midterms. But the 2012 election is more than a year away, and the man who made it all the way to the most powerful office on earth sans identity documents has all the booty, and the absolute power it brings, at his command. North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue was not joking when she spoke about suspending elections. Nor did she pick the idea out of thin air. Perdue was giving the suspend-congressional-elections idea its first oxygen for her hell-bent-for-leather boss. It is crucial to not let this day go down without remembering what Perdue said.”

     I am encouraged that our neighbors to the north are waking up to the seriousness of our situation. I only pray that my neighbors down the street and across the country awake as well. While on the local radio program Talk Back, the day previous to Gov. Perdue’s “suggestion,” I put forth that while we need good men and women to be involved in the process now more than ever, our problems are already beyond human remedy alone. While the old patriot flag with the saying “Don’t Tread On Me” has become popular, there was another flag used by the Sons of Liberty that read “Appeal to Heaven.” Perhaps we should dust this one off as well, for we need Divine guidance and intervention now more than ever. Yet I am more convinced than ever that if we appeal to heaven, heaven will answer, and God will act on our behalf. But we must awake and appeal.

On the Feast of Trumpets I was thinking about Ezekiel’s warning, and perhaps it is just as meaningful today as it was when he wrote it.

“When he sees the sword coming upon the land, if he blows the trumpet and warns the people, then whoever hears the sound of the trumpet and does not take warning, if the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be on his own head.
He heard the sound of the trumpet, but did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But he who takes warning will save his life.
But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand” (Ezekiel 33:3-6).

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