Harlingen, Texas, March 20, 2010: We are seeing almost daily marches on Washington. The Capital switchboard has been jammed by more than capacity calls around the clock. Many, if not all, members of Congress have turned off their computers and stopped receiving email. Why? They have created a corrupt bill falsely labeled health care reform. It is designed to bankrupt the nation and they know Americans are enraged.
As a personal testimony you should know I spent almost four years of my life in combat. A year and a half of that time I was a Marine rifleman in an infantry company. The remainder was spent as a combat correspondent. During those years I was often frightened, but comforted by the knowledge my leaders knew their war craft well and every other Marine had my back.
Since my military retirement I have spent 35 years in the civilian world. I have watched my new leaders and some were good, some bad. But never, until now, have I felt the fear, which exists across this country with every new word that is uttered by a band of 535 political miscreants and their White House partners in crime.
The political elite of Washington have looked at America and studied the actions of the people over the years. They know that for the vast majority of the population the political world is a complete mystery. In the most serious of political hours, such as a presidential race, only about half of the country becomes truly engaged.
Most of our citizens have very poor long-term memories. If something didn't pop up on the TV news in the past couple of weeks, it doesn't exist in their world. So, even if the politicians give us the most disastrous and convoluted health bill in history during March, they believe it will be forgotten come November. What they have forgotten themselves is that when the colonists get really, really angry they don't forget - they strike back.
There are more Americans living today who don't know the story of our nation than at any time in our history. This is all compliments of the National Education Association and its 40-year progressive agenda of dumbing down America. Still, there are those of us who remember that before the stars and stripes even existed, we declared our independence with a large yellow flag. Spreading across that waving cloth was a coiled rattlesnake and the words, "Don't Tread On Me".
Benjamin Franklin was the first to use a rattlesnake symbol on what is considered to be the original political cartoon decrying the treatment of the colonies by Great Britain. From that point onward it was used in all 13 colonies, newspapers, even on paper money.
When the Continental Congress created five companies of Marines to defend our ships at sea, the new Marines painted their recruiting drums yellow, emblazoned them with a coiled rattlesnake and the words "Don't Tread On Me". From that beginning grew what was to become known as the Gadsden Flag and the primary symbol of our fight for freedom.
If you will look around at the Tea Party gatherings, the marches on Washington, the protests in front of local, state and national governmental offices you will see the Gadsden Flag is flying again. The rattlesnake is coiled and it is doing what rattlesnakes always do...warning Washington
"Don't Tread On Me.".
Semper Fidelis
Thomas D. Segel
tomsegel@sbcglobal.net
