CADIPS PRESS Selected Illustration: Old Ironsides, U.S. frigate Constitution, built 1797, Library of Congress-LC-D416-22735 Article by J. Michael Sharman,
Contributing Writer
When a ship at sea has sprung a serious leak, the menu items for tomorrow or repainting the handrailings instantly lose their former importance.
At that point, the only truly critical matter is diagnosing and repairing the cause of the leak. The focus of all hands is not on the water damage being suffered by the cargo: the cause of the cargo getting wet is clearly the problem that needs immediate attention.
A ship’s most important component is its keel. It is the structural member to which all the other parts of the ship are directly or indirectly attached.
When a ship has a broken keel, it is said to have “broken its back” and salvage companies declare it to be a total loss. Only a total overhaul can then rebuild the ship, which must be done literally from the ground up.
Our ship of state was built with such a well-designed and well-built keel that she has sailed longer, straighter and truer than any other ship of state ever built.
Our keel is the Declaration of Independence. All of the other parts of our national structure and existence flow from it, and specifically from the first phrases of its second paragraph:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
A ship’s keel won’t break except under severe structural stress such as by being run aground, or in the case of Captain Ahab’s longboat, being struck by the monster white whale, Moby Dick.
Undeterred by cares for his crew or his ship, Ahab simply had the ship’s carpenter carve a new wooden leg for him out of his longboat’s broken keel and continued on the obsessive chase that ended only with his own death.
We need to seriously ask ourselves whether we have allowed our ship of state to be run aground or smashed by a force of fabled proportions, and whether we, like Capt. Ahab, are simply using its broken pieces to hobble toward our eventual destruction.
Do we still believe that the “truths” in our Declaration to be so obvious that they are self-evident? If His existence is so obvious it needs no other evidence, why do we shape our public policy as though there is no provable evidence of God’s existence?
We have also ceased to believe that all men are created equal. No longer do we ask to be judged by the content of our character and to be allowed to rise or fall on our own merits.
Look further down the length of our keel – if we believe that the entire purpose of government is to secure the self-evident rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then why do we constantly legislate against life and increasingly indenture ourselves and our children with each subsequent piece of legislation?
Ahab refused to listen to the good advice of his first mate, Starbuck: “In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone - all good angels mobbing thee with warnings: - what more wouldst thou have?”
Rather than ignoring the clear warnings we’ve been given and perversely maintaining a course toward our own destruction, we should return to the safe harbor established by our Declaration and begin, with integrity, the steady and sure process of rebuilding our ship from the ground up.
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