Be the Expert

Educate yourself, and seek out those worthy of learning from.

 The importance of original sources

The Constitution of the United States

If you are to be a responsible guardian of truth you must educate yourself. No one news agency will give you the whole truth about anything, especially when it comes to politics. If you want your elected officials to follow the Constitution then you must know the constitution. If you want Congress and the Senate to read the bills before voting on them then you need to at least become familiar with the bills. If you want Congress to control their spending then you need to first know what they are spending your hard earned money on so that you can challenge them on it. In your quest for knowledge you should learn as much as you can from original sources. An interpretation of an original source will only tell you what someone else wants you to think, not the truth as it was intended. I challenge you to learn the Constitution of our United States. Don’t just read it once and sit it down, but read it regularly and thoroughly until it is branded into your mind. Once you have learned the Constitution I further challenge you to become a watchdog for our country. Make sure our political leaders have their feet held to the fire any time they try to interpret the Constitution to fit their own agenda.    

Ideas about where to start

It is often easier to know you should do something than knowing where to start. I know in my life there are countless examples of where I gave up early on because I didn't have any direction. There are many other times in my life though where I was blessed with someone who took me under their wing and lead me a bit of the way. I've learned in life that finding those worthy of learning from isn't all that difficult. Most people with good things to teach only need be asked. With that said I have provided a list of links below for you to start with. This is a starting point and nothing more. What really matters is where you go from here. 

• Read our Historical Documents and print them to share.  
•  Learn how to Contact Your Government officials.
• See the Budget of the U.S. Government for yourself.
• Read all current Congressional Bills or an overview of them.
• Visit the Library of Congress’s Virtual Reference Shelf and see what interests you.

Inspiration from my past

Declaration of Independence

I'll never forget the first time I read our Declaration of Independence. I was 27 years old. I had been thinking about some of the more pressing political issues of the time and where we were headed as a nation. I figured if I was to understand where we were going I should start at the beginning and see how we got here. With that idea in my mind I went online, did a quick Google search and clicked on the first result that said PDF. Sitting there reading our most sacred founding document I began to get angry. I was angry at the school system for not making me read this before. I was angry at my parents for forgetting to make sure I knew why we really celebrate the Fourth of July. But I was mostly angry at myself for waiting until I was almost 30 before taking the initiative to read our Declaration of Independence. I always thought I was a patriot but now I knew what a real patriot was. I didn't stop with our Declaration of Independence, and I hope you won't stop at the end of this paragraph.

Feel free to leave a comment or two about your ideas on what it takes to be worthy of being learned from and how such people have touched your life.     

The Who, the Why, and the How

Of all people to start being more politically active I am the last person anyone suspected. That change seemed abrupt to my friends and family but it had been cooking inside me a very long time. I am an ex paratrooper with the 82^nd airborne where I was a combat meteorologist for seven years. I have watched our country change while we were all fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have watched helplessly as our politicians changed the rules of engagement over and over until we had no chance of winning. And I have watched powerlessly as the people we send to Washington to represent us stab each other in the back, lie to us, steal our money, drive up the deficit, and one by one chisel away our freedoms.

So what changed me? There were two defining events that took place in my life side by side. On September 11, 2009 I marched on Washington with the Tea Party, and on September 13, 2009 my wife and I learned we were going to have our first child. I went to Washington not so much to be an activist but to find out if the Tea Party was real or if they were the kooks the media made them out to be. While in D.C. I learned I was not at all alone in my worries over the future of our country and that they call it media bias for a reason. When I got home I knew there must be something I can do about it; but what? Then two days later after learning we were going to bring a child into this mess my need to do something became a shadow that followed me everywhere. I knew I could not change Washington outright, but I also knew I couldn’t sit back and do nothing any more.

And now we skip ahead 16 months into the present day where I find myself writing my first blog post with only the smallest inkling of an idea about what I am doing. My seven month old son gave me the idea. You see; while I may not be able to change Washington, I can instill strong morals in my son and bring him up to do the same. I can give others ideas about how they can change themselves and those around them for the better. I can change myself to be the kind of person I want in Washington. And if I and we change enough people around us we can change an entire culture. We can make sure that our next generation of leaders hold themselves accountable to their actions and words. We can make sure our next generation of leaders doesn’t just pretend to uphold the Constitution. And we can ensure our next generation of leaders knows why they are patriotic and not just how to throw patriotism around for personal gain.

And so I start with this first blog post and pray there will be many more to come and that someone might care enough to read them. Changing a country is a tall task but you’ll never get there if you don’t change yourself first. From there it’s just one person at a time.