Day 314: The Extreme, Part I

It’s Day 314 of flattening a 15-day curve and Day 74 of a three-week curfew.

Deb and I are well.

Yesterday morning she observed that my header images lately have all been pointy and sharp, encouraging me to go with something different before readers start thinking this is a knife blog. (Like that’d be a bad thing, right?)

Okay, fine — today it’s a pic of a warm campfire on an unseasonably chilly evening, from our Escape last September to Delaware County. Those three days are worth recalling for the good times they were, for the joy the memories bring now, and for the promise of adventure in the months to come.

The knives will be back, though. That’s a promise.

Something I said yesterday surely raised a few eyebrows. In this homogenized time of ours, with its calls for “unity” and its crippling reliance on compromise, I suspect I may have struck a match with this line:

“America was founded by extremists, not centrists.”

Think about it — the Founders didn’t undertake a negotiation. We don’t remember those Patriots for being sellouts and we don’t praise the Minutemen for “reaching across the aisle.” Our forefathers were revolutionaries, and they fought a revolution.

The Founders were extremists.

They not only drew a line, they defended that line with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. They were radicals in their day — “the Three Percent,” as some of us like to say — but they were radicals in the cause of Liberty.

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Barry Goldwater, 1964

It seems to me that Life presents us with three moments in which extremism is called for. The first is when all other reasonable options have been exhausted. The second is when time is short. And the third is when the opposing forces are extremists themselves.

Our radical Founders were pressed into revolution by the first and the second. We, today, in defense of Liberty and the very future of America, face all three.

But for extremists then, America would not exist. Without extremists now, we will not prevail and America will be lost.

Without extremists, America will not survive.

I’m tempted to go further today but I’ll leave it at that for now. I intend to pick up from there in a future post.

Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.

#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath