QUESTION # 2: Can America’s basic freedoms: Religion, Speech, Press, or to Assemble be lost? If yes, how? If yes, why?

# 1: Alexander Tyler, in the 1790s, provided us with an insight on how a nation’s freedoms can be lost when he penned: ...."A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury(listen to the promises being made by candidates in this years upcoming elections), with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy (taxing and spending), always followed by a dictatorship." (Is our day the day Tyler wrote of?)

de Tocqueville described this process with these words: "That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority its object was to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, providing they think of nothing but rejoicing. .... For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, to spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living." (This form of government takes away one’s ability to build one’s dream, or to use one’s agency - the rules are absolute.)

And lastly de Tocqueville described what happens to individuals under these conditions with these words: "After having thus successively taken each member of the community into its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd." (The fear to speak out, or get involved.) .... "The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided - men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people till [the] nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." (Strong, but very prophetic words. Is America now headed in this direction?)

A MODERN THOUGHT TO PONDER: "While our inspired Constitution is designed to protect us from excesses in government power, it cannot protect us from our own excessive appetites or from indifference to basic principles." Neal A Maxwell - July 4, 1993 - published in "Just and Holy Principles" by Simon and Schuster Custom Publishing, 1998

Have you read the PREAMBLE to our CONSTITUTION lately? It reads....

"WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to (1) form a more perfect union, (2) establish justice, (3) insure domestic tranquility, (4) provide for the common defense, (5) promote the general welfare, and (6) secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

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