Yes We Can- Expanded

I wrote this speech for a speech and debate competition in January. It's so much more powerful if you here it in person, in fact I got superior on delivery from all the judges, but you'll just have to settle for this...Though I would be happy to give it to you any time you want!

President Obama recently stated:

"In the unlikely story of America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of the people. Yes we can. It was the creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.”

These are powerful and inspirational words, but there’s something missing, one critical element has been left out.

Permit me to bring to your remembrance a painting, one of aprominent man from the revolutionary war, a time when our forefathers truly did face down impossible odds. This painting is one of George Washington kneeling on the white, snow covered ground, uttering a prayer of earnest supplication to his God.

Now recall with me the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. It was towards the end, the whole convention was stagnant, nothing was getting done, no progress was being made, and the government they had dreamed of now seemed impossible to bring into actuality. They were on the precipice of disaster, the zenith of despair, when a wise man, by the name of Benjamin Franklin, stood, and suggested that they implore that same Being for help who had delivered them from the awful grasp of a despotic tyrant.

Permit me to draw one more example before I move on, that of the founding documents which, like a parent to a tender child, have shaped and guided the destiny of this nation. Where is it written into the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence, “Yes We Can?” Nowhere! At least not directly, though it may be derived from the statement that it is our right and our duty to throw of any government designing to reduce us under absolute despotism; yes, we can throw them off, we have the right, but why is this right, this duty, if not for the unalienable rights of life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with which our creator has endowed us?

When Washington and Franklin faced down those impossible odds, were they saying ‘yes we can?’ Or rather, were they saying ‘yes we can, because in God we trust?’

Was not this the creed upon which this nation was founded? Is not that the motto written across our currency? Is not this the Spirit which generations of Americans have adopted, that is, until recently?

When you remove this critical element from the government, it’s not unlike forgetting the leavening, or the rising agent, when making bread. At first, when the bread is still dough, you can’t tell that it’s missing, but when the bread is put into the oven tested and tried by the immense heat, instead of rising to it’s full potential, bread, the mainstay of life, it falls.

What has happened to our country to make us forget this essential element? Why, in the time when we need Him the most, in the heat of these modern days, have we taken God out o our schools, our government, and our lives?

How has atheism become our national religion? What happens now?

What happens now that we’ve taken God out of our government? The government becomes a god.

For proof of this claim, we only need look at our own country.

The phrase innocent until proven guilty, for instance, comes from the Anglo-Saxons and was later expanded upon by Blackstone. They believed it was better for guilty man to go free, than for an innocent man to be punished, deprived by man of his God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Because God is just, and will punish the guilty ; but they would be cursed of God for holding an innocent man in captivity, or depriving him of his life.

When you take God out of it, that essential leavening, doesn’t it seem more reasonable that a man questionably committed a heinous crime of one sort or another be deprived of life liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, then that he go free and perhaps commit the same crime again?

And without a Creator to crown us with those unalienable rights, where else would they come from but the government? And if the government has the power to provide or grant us these rights, does it not also have the power to define what they mean, and even, to take them away? Or, if there is no God, do we even have rights?

To paraphrase Nietzsche "Rights are dead, and we have killed them."


Another example is the hate crime laws. Hate crime, in essence, committing a crime against someone because of their ethnicity, religion, handicap, or gender orientation. The only difference between this and a so called regular crime, is hate crimes are punished more severely. By adding this additional punishment, not only are you punishing the act of crime, but also the thought and the feeling behind the crime or the ‘belief’ if you will.

By doing this, the government is stepping into the realm where only God should reign!


The heart.


But because there is no God, this is all reasonable. Their only using that power, and control for good, right? To protect people from hating each other, to foster love. They are the highest authority, after all, and without God, how else will can we bring this hideous desire and feeling into subjection?

When we take God out a the government, the government assumes the
role of a god, and we let it, for we have forgotten.

"The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forefathers fought are still at issue around the globe; the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God." Said President JFK

"If Americans should ever come to believe that their rights and freedoms are instituted among men by politicians and bureacrats, then they will no longer carry theproud inheretance of their forefathers,but will grovel before their masters seeking favors and dispensations." Said Ezra Taft Benson, former secretary of agriculture and influential religious leader.

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but by His wrath." Said president Jefferson


"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us." Abraham Lincoln

'If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.' - Ronald Reagan

"And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the arock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall." Helaman 5:12

In these words we find the solution. WE MUST REMEMBER. We must remember where our rights come from, and we must declare it to those who have forgotten.

But this solution, as with anything with value, takes time. You can plant an apple seed, but it takes years before that seed will produce fruit. Yet in the meantime, their will be weeds that begin to grow, insects that attempt to infest, and howling winds seeking to destroy.
So it is also with this solution. While people are remembering, laws will be made, politicians elected, and the fierce winds of persecution will blow.
We must protect this precious tree.
How?
Actively involve yourself in politics, shout for those policies which are right and do all in your power to stop those from passing which will destroy, and elect those who will do the same!

Then, once again, instead of being one nation gone under, we will be one nation under God that has risen above, then once again, these words upon which our nation was founded, will ring louder and louder from coast to coast - YES WE CAN, BECAUSE IN GOD WE TRUST!