When I was recovering from heart problems in 2016, I came to the realization that I was closer to my grave than I was to my birth; my own mortality was staring me in the face. I began to think about my father and it dawned on me that my two daughters and his other grandchildren never really benefited first-hand from his wisdom. It was then that I started to direct my attention toward composing a series of short stories on how he taught me the meaning of self-ownership and personal sovereignty and the miracle of what our founding fathers had achieved in creating a civil and political environment favorable to meet those ends. The result is the book UnaLIENable.
What was my Aim
My goal was to demonstrate, as my father had done for me, that our founding principles are being eroded by gradual, subtle alterations in the meanings of important words and the underlying notions of our founder’s original intent. My father was able to educate me at an early age as to the true meaning of unalienability and its absolute necessity to matters of Liberty, Government, and Economics.
America is Exceptional
My father showed me that the there was a long line of reasoning adhering to Natural Law behind what would eventually be referred to as American Exceptionalism, commonly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830’s, that appears in no other governmental structure that ever existed upon the face of the earth. The young French traveler observed that, in contrast to all other nations which were defined by geography, ethnicity, a common heritage, or hierarchal, social class structures, America was a melting pot of immigrants tied together by being committed to the shared principles of liberty, equality under the law, individualism and free-market economics. Our founders considered human interactions within these spheres as unalienable and subject to voluntary exchanges in the absence of coercion.
The Purpose Versus the Meaning of Life
Among the many pieces of wisdom that my father gave me was that many people who seek to philosophically understand why they are here, often confuse the purpose and meaning of life. He explained it to me this way: The purpose of life is communication; the transmission of our genetic code into an unknown future for an unknown reason. This is common to all life forms. The meaning of life is based upon what we desire for ourselves following the moral expressions of our own free will to obtain whatever we wish for ourselves. We were put here to decide for ourselves the meaning of our own lives guided by Natural Law and free from the imposition of the will of others. The genius of America is that it was the intent of those wise men, for the first time in human history, to create a secure environment for each and every one of us to reach for our own meaning in life with a minimum of controls by an authoritative government. I view a revival of this original concept as fundamental if America is to survive as a free nation.
Though I had my father’s descendants in mind when I began writing this book, I soon realized, seeing the state of affairs in America today, that many others may benefit from his judicious considerations of the uniquely American view of the individual as the smallest minority in society and why freedom must overcome serfdom.