When I speak to young people about leadership, I like to draw from my own experiences three points with credibility. First, leadership roles and experiences early on, i.e., in your youth—stick with you and make it easier to pick up similar and even greater roles throughout your entire life. Second, although certainly not identical, some leadership skills are transferable from political to military to business and back to political pursuit. My experience today as Chairperson of the Central Texas Tea Party is reminiscent of my Teen-Age Republican (TAR) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) participation during the Reagan Revolution thirty years ago. Lastly, and borrowing a lesson from history, the big political waves don’t come around all that often—when they do, individuals who catch the wave are better off by far and smarter, for having taken part in something historical.
The fact is that everything builds on everything else and there is no “freebie” in life. The process involves an accumulation of study, work, experience and achievements that move or convey you, over time to higher positions and quite possibly, by the grace of God, to your dreams! Everything counts: reading, playing and behaving; studying in high school to make good grades; making good grades in high school in order to get into college; doing well in college or quite possibly at your first job, in order to get to that employment level that starts a ladder of upward mobility; and then taking one position at a time to get to the other; and finally, from one career to another—so that eventually, retirement really does resemble those mythological “Golden Years.” Everything you do becomes a vantage point to the next step, and to all else that follows.
Of course what I’m implying is that time and effort spent in youth leadership activities (say, organizing a Young Patriots group) begets other, higher positions of leadership and the skills needed for such positions. As I have stated and written before, there is definitely something going on in the country, including Texas in a reaction to President Obama’s relentless progressive agenda. More than at any time since the late 1970s, people have awoken to a sense of danger and a strong desire to do something political. Now I’m going to refrain from saying more about our president or the military’s Commander-In-Chief, other than to point out that he is indeed a civilian president elected every four years. He has command of the people’s military, but Americans have no Commander-In-Chief. The military is subordinate to civilian political leadership and civilians also do not salute their president. Sometimes political leaders forget that Americans are not supposed to take orders from Washington. Rather, Americans are supposed to be left as a free people, at liberty to do things for themselves and families in the ways they personally see fit, with money they have earned.
Historically states created the federal government, not the other way around; and the people of the several states delegated to the federal government enumerated powers but kept everything else to themselves. This past Saturday (26 June) there was a Tenth Amendment Town Hall Meeting held in Temple at which six conservative Texas State legislators, including Ralph Sheffield were present and fielded questions. It was indicative of what you already know if you follow the news carefully, and that is that many states’ Attorneys General have filed suit against the Obama health reform bill on the basis of the Tenth Amendment.
You need to read the Constitution. If words mean anything, then it is impossible to figure where the federal government discerns a power to make private individuals buy something, much less private health insurance; and then tries to enforce legislation using a taxing agency like the IRS. Every citizen of these United States needs to read and study the Constitution and refuse to let the Constitution be trampled by anyone or by any single branch of the federal government. Before it’s all over with, the politics of the tea parties and of conservative groups around the country may even involve civil disobedience—because the principles involved today are as fundamental as what Jim Crow and segregation involved in the 1960s during the civil rights movement. Remember there are different kinds of enslavement and vestiges of the same, as well as tyranny in many guises. The government is not necessarily a benevolent master, and even if it were the American people will not suffer a yoke from any man or institution save Jesus Christ himself.
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