Letter: Election is not the end of our duty as citizens

Dear Editor:
With election day now behind us many are happy that all the ads and rhetoric are over with for the next two to four years. However, they are not. KrisAnne Hall has put into words the sentiment of many that election day was just the beginning.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news but your vote will not change anything. Not because the system is rigged. But because voting is not how we change government. That is how the system is designed.
A vote doesn’t change anything because it happens once every two years, at best. Voting is how we select people to represent us. But that is not the end, it is the beginning.
‘It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The condition upon which God grants liberty to man is eternal vigilance, and if that condition is broken, servitude is his punishment and immediate indication of his guilt.’ J. Curran 1790
If we vote, then sleep, nothing changes. The only way anything bad will change, the only way anything good will remain, is if we are involved every day with a consistent standard of limited government and preservation of the liberty of the people. We must prevent the fickle influence of the “will of the people” and stick with the Constitution, as the rule of law.
Matthew 13:25 (KJV) ‘But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.’
The system is designed so that just a vote doesn’t change government, to just vote merely maintains the status quo.
The system is designed so that those who love liberty must be daily vigilant and be ever present, active influence for good upon our government. Otherwise the government becomes an ever present, active influence for power over the people.
Believing that a vote changes government is asserting that one person had the ultimate power to fix all wrongs. No man has that power and to offer up that solution is nothing more than idolatry.
Are we in servitude? The answer to that question will tell us how we have handled our responsibility to liberty and how we have succeeded or failed in controlling government rather than it controlling us.”
It is our duty be aware of legislation being considered and to contact our elected officials, both national, state and local, and inform them of what we expect of them as our representatives.
In liberty,
Richard Brooks
Meeker