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Eric LaMont Gregory, Political Correspondent

Eric LaMont Gregory

We live in very interesting times, and it is perhaps time to take stock of the social fabric of our communities and of this nation.

Every society has its problems, and in rather austere times ‘the problem’  has too often been some group against whom others could lash out.  But, the lash often does not discourage but summons the courage for those rallied against to emerge stronger.

Yet, it is a cruel fate that we must spend so much energy healing the cuts of injustice, rather than promoting justice.

‘The path to liberty,” Thomas Jefferson wrote during the troubled times that were the birth of the American Republic, “is often strewed with thorns’.

The philippic nature of contemporary political discourse is not consultatory, but self-righteous.  We are presented with plans, what is missing is the diagnosis of the problems, and the coming together, to work together to devise an approach to the resolution of our problems in which every citizen can take a willing and an active part.

What has brought a semblance of social cohesion to our communities has been by the efforts of those that stood against the tide ofinhumanity.  Those who dared to come not with a plan, but with open arms and a vision, a dream of what can be, and what will be when liberty reigns supreme.

It is not inconceivable that a contradiction can exist between what is legal and what is right, lest we forget that law infinitely measurable is not justice infinitely consequential.

And that, the enduring measure of the American Republic in embodied in a written Constitution, while the magnitude of the American experience was borne in a Declaration.

It should be remembered that ‘when law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for law.’

To those who must stand against the tide, the choice is either to lie ‘ … fallen cold and dead’ … or  to take arms against a sea of troubles.  And, by opposing, end them’.