At the County Fair

I am gradually getting the picture. I'll just touch on the vision lightly here. I'm seeing in my mind a picture of activities at your local County Fair in the near future.  The Livestock and 4-H shows, the rodeo, the carnival rides, live music shows, gardening displays, food vendors and home baking/cooking contests, inventions, fashions, and technology shows - all the things we expect and enjoy at a County Fair are in place in my mind, but there is also something new. What is new in this vision of a County Fair is a Militia presence.

In addition to marksmanship classes, shooting contests, gun-and-gear seminars and gun dealer displays, Militia activities at the County Fair will include history classes, a drum-and-fife corps, color guard, Sheriff's Posse organizational drills and the County Militia and Veterans marching band parade.

That is a hint of a vision, (there is much, much more!) and we certainly do not see the Militia when we look at County Fairs across America today, but the vision is based on our nation's memory when we hark back to Colonial days before the American Revolution and see that our forefathers in all the Colonies celebrated their Militias as a vital part of their communities and individual lives.

Where I learned to see how the Militia was the popular way of establishing and keeping community health, prosperity, and security is within the pages of Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr.'s fascinating book, "The Sword And Sovereignty: The Constitutional Principles of the Militia of the several States", which you can get in pdf form on a CD from Amazon on the Net.

  (Photo courtesy of constitutionalmilitia.org) 

In Amazon.com's notation about the book (with a couple of my edits below) we read:

The Sword and Sovereignty is a comprehensive CD-ROM study, 2,304 pages in length, with 6,544 footnotes and endnotes, of the constitutional and statutory history of America's Militia, which gives special emphasis to the unique and indispensable rôle of the Militia as the institutions through which WE THE PEOPLE ourselves ultimately provide, or withhold, the consent of the governed upon which this country's form of government depends for its legitimacy. The Sword and Sovereignty derives the basic legal and practical principles of the Militia from a detailed study of the pre-constitutional Militia statutes of Rhode Island and Virginia selected, for reasons the book makes clear, as exemplars of what happened throughout America in that era. It explains how these principles are embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and how they should be applied in the operation of America's true federal system of government. Indeed, why it is Congress' and every State's duty to see to the organization of, and every Americans personal duty to participate in, the Militia, and why that is more imperative now than ever before. It exposes the dangerous fallacy in the contemporary individual-rights misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, and explains how the Supreme Court's Heller decision reduced American's right * * * to keep and bear Arms to a level far below what our forebears enjoyed when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified. And it examines ways in which revitalized Militia of the several States could, should, and if they were properly revitalized would deal with many of the most pressing contemporary problems this country faces, such as the correction of rogue public officials, the supervision of the military-industrial complex, the conduct of honest elections and the provision of an alternative currency, etc., etc.