Guest column: Is this the country the founders envisioned?
Hillpoint VFW Post 3434 presented this year’s Voice of Democracy Essay Contest Award to Weston High School student Jessica Timm. She is seen here with Pastor Don Glanzer and Quartermaster LaVerne Gher. Timm received a certificate and $50 scholarship. The essay contest is open to high school students and featured the theme, Is This the Country the Founders Envisioned? Timm’s essay will advance to the district level. The Voice of Democracy program has been the VFW’s premier scholarship effort since 1947. Every year, nearly 57,000 students compete for more than $2 million in scholarships and incentives. (Submitted photo)
This question is a hard one to answer, because the answer is both yes and no. The founders of this country wanted the people here to have a decentralized government and protection of our God-given rights. They sacrificed a lot so that we would have a government that protected their people’s rights.
Our country stood for the freedom of its people and stood for the fact that we are all created equal. As the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” but even at the time this was written, not everyone was treated equally. Our country has since changed it ways such as slavery and women’s rights. We eliminated segregation in the 1960’s.
We as a nation have moved to protecting our people’s civil rights and accepting people as people by legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015.
Our founding fathers also did not want to be part of foreign affairs with other countries, and wished to stay neutral with all of the countries. It was John Quincy Adams who restated this principle to Congress that America, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” However, sometimes we as a country can get caught up in unnecessary conflicts, in fact, we have been at war 93 percent of the time since the United States was established.
The founding fathers were also heavily afraid of a government controlled by the rich. Rarely are campaigns run by the kindness of people’s hearts, but more often than not, they are funded by big corporations and are controlled by vast wealth. Whereas, the founding father’s outline of campaigns was set as sending someone they greatly respected to Washington for some time, to vote for someone with only the best intentions for its people and nation. It was never about wealth. Now we have a set political class that is sponsored by corporations wanting only to influence the politician’s decisions in the future.
In all honesty, I do not know exactly what our founding fathers would have thought about this country and how it has turned out. I feel as though we have come very far in many ways, but I also feel there have been situations we have not exactly followed through on, as the founding fathers would have wanted us to. So yes and no, to this being the country the founding fathers had envisioned.
Jessica Timm, a Weston High School student, won the Democracy Essay Contest through Hillpoint VFW Post 3434.
