Indiana, The Great Smoky Mountains and Gettysburg

or

Turn Off Megyn Kelly, Wolf Blitzer And Ed Schultz And Go Talk To Your Neighbor

This morning I was thinking about the Freedom of Religion law in Indiana and the backlash over it.    I was hiking in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park yesterday and came upon some old abandoned home sites.  They were perched atop a ridge overlooking a mountain stream below.  A sign informed me that this use to be a community but that when the Federal Government decided to create the park these homeowners were forced to sale and abandon their homes.  I thought about how I would feel if the government took away my farm on the Tennessee River.  They would set the price, and even provide the force to push me off.  Why; because they make the laws and fund the forces that can back up the laws.  Somewhere in Indiana and in the Great Smoky Mountains the government “of the people, by the people and for the people” needs to be thought about and not screamed at each other.  Modern media and special interests thrive on controversy and so they create it.  Humans thrive in community. 

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Turn off Megyn Kelly, Wolf Blitzer and Ed Schultz and go talk to your neighbor. 

One of those abandoned homes.