The Meaning of Eternal Vigilance

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active.  The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” — John Philpot Curran

If July 4th is to have any meaningful significance beyond a historic day in the 18th century– if there is really any cause for celebration, if the founding of this nation holds any transcendence– then it is up to us, the benefactors of the greatest civil inheritance history has ever known to both understand and guard it. This inheritance is the greatest level of personal liberty that man has known under human rule. And the product of this restrained liberty has been the greatest level of prosperity in history. True gratitude for this great legacy requires a jealous defense of the individual freedom which our founding fathers secured for us through the American Revolution.
But the prosperity which we have the priviledge to enjoy today is jeopardized by our collective ignorance and apathy. While it is certainly important to recognize the sacrifices that our troops are making every day and have made in the wars of the past, it is impossible to truly appreciate their sacrifice without fully recognizing the exceptional situation which we have today. We are indeed the freest nation in the world because we have a constitution unlike any other in the world, written by mortal men who truly believed that God’s hand sustained and enabled them to ”secure the blessings of liberty” to themselves and their posterity.  
Eternal vigilance requires that we protect this Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, just as soldiers are required to pledge.  The most basic way to do this is to love and guard our rights which the Constitution guarantees. Obviously, the space and time constraints on me as a writer do not allow me to thoroughly enumerate and expound upon these rights. But there are fundamental rights that the writers of the Constitution identified from which all other rights are derived. This was what was commonly called natural (meaning God-given) law, summed up in the Declaration of Independence as ”life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, but are more commonly referred to as life, liberty and property.
Each of these fundamental rights is continually under attack, more often by domestic than foreign enemies. Our duty, then, is to understand what these rights mean, how they are being attacked, and do whatever we can to defend them. This requires an active involvement in the cause of liberty. If not in direct involvement, at least in indirect or simple ways, like supporting those who protect our freedoms both in the foreign battlefield as well the ideological battlefield, such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute or other great institutions. I daresay, however, that without political involvement, particularly at the grass roots level, our Constitution will no longer be relevant to political discussion. Some day, we will have so strayed from the Constitution and our founding father’s original intent, that only a violent overthrow of the government would liberate us. We cannot afford apathy anymore. We must not remain blind to the intrusions on our liberties. While we are still empowered to do something, we must take action.