Our Concord Bridge

Has the audacity of the Obama Administration and the sanctimonious stooges; Reid, Pelosi, and Biden pushed America to the Concord Bridge of the Twenty-First Century. Our Concord Bridge is no wooden bridge over the Concord River in Massachusetts, a bridge barely big enough for a small wagon to pass: today’s Concord Bridge is a huge overpass, high above the desert on Interstate 15, a four lane divided highway, cutting through several Western states and connecting Canada and Mexico.

Yes, we have come a long way, but once again we are confronting tyranny and an overbearing government more interested in the rich rewards of Crony Capitalism than in governing the country for the benefit and will of the American people.

To see the similarities of Concord Bridge and Bundy Ranch, we should recall those days of our nation’s conception.

It can be argued that the American revolution began with the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Resentment had been festering for several years between the colonists and British authorities, especially in Massachusetts. In 1764, Great Britain used taxation as a means to raise revenue from the 13 colonies, these included the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and Townshend Act. The Townshend Act was a series of import duties on glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea. These taxes were considered excessive, and the colonists questioned whether the King of England had the right to tax the colonists without their representation. Taxation was seen as repression, and the tempers of the colonists were seething with rage; although, many colonists were against using violence to assert themselves, many colonists of Massachusetts were preparing to meet the most powerful army in the world on the field of battle. A spark was all that was required to set the revolutionary machinery in motion.

March 5, 1770, was the day of the Boston Massacre. An unruly crowd of colonists were harassing a lone sentry, when a squad of British riflemen, led by Captain Thomas Preston, were dispatched to support the sentry. The British soldiers fired multiple volleys into the protesters, three were killed instantly and two died later of their wounds. Captain Preston and eight of his men were arrested for murder. John Adams and Josiah Quincy volunteered to represent the soldiers, who committed the Massacre. It was a move designed to establish the legitimacy of the colonial judicial system.

Captain Preston and six of his men were found innocent after the prosecution failed to present a convincing case; although, two of the men were found guilty of manslaughter, branded on their hands and released. The Boston Massacre became a focal point for the rallying of colonists to resist the British Crown.

British regulars had been billeted among the homes of the people of Boston, since 1768, this led to resentment and harassment of British Customs officials, who were trying to enforce the Townshend Acts. There were numerous confrontations between colonists and British regulars, but it was the Massacre on March 5, that enraged the colonists. The engraving of the massacre by Paul Revere circulated throughout the colonies and aroused the public to the point of protests and threats of violence.

The threat of violence was so intense, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson withdrew the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor to insure a truce between the colonists and the British.

Although, many patriots were disgruntled with the verdicts, the withdrawal of the British troops and the repeal of all but one of the import duties lessened the anger of the colonists. However, Hutchison’s withdrawal of British troops, served to illustrate the strength of local organized resistance, after reducing the king’s imperial power to the point of impotence.

The Boston Tea Party took place in 1773 and the British Parliament declared Massachusetts in open rebellion; King George decided to increase the military presence, and in June 1774, he closed Boston Harbor, until the colonists paid for the tea that was dumped overboard.

At the break of dawn, on April 17, 1775, 700 British troops were dispatched from Boston to Concord to seize a suspected cache of weapons. At Lexington Green, they encountered 77 armed militia men. A British major ordered the militia to disarm.

“Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels.”

The militia commander ordered his men to disperse, but a shot rang out from an unknown shooter. The British fired several volleys into the militia, killing eight and wounding nine.

The British suffered only one wounded and pressed on to concord to find the cache of weapons that had been moved earlier. Although most of the weapons were in another location, the British found some weapons and burned them. The fire was out of control for a short period and several hundred militiamen, who had gathered on the high ground just outside of Concord, thought the town was being torched. The militia rushed toward the North Bridge and confronted a small group of British regulars stationed to guard the bridge.

The British soldiers defending the bridge opened fire, but fell back when the militia returned fire with a strong volley. At this point, the American minute men stood up to the most powerful army in the world and fired the, “Shot fired ‘round the world” a phrase to be immortalized later by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The British contingent searching for weapons in Concord stayed approximately four hours and prepared to march back to Boston, a distance of 18 miles, but because several riders had ridden through the countryside warning the militia, as soon as the British left Boston, over 2,000 minutemen descended on Concord and more kept arriving.

Initially, the militia was content to follow the British column, but fighting broke out and the militia began firing from behind stone walls, buildings, trees, and creek beds. Discipline broke down in the British ranks, they were trained to confront an enemy in an open field of battle in the tradition of the Napoleonic wars, being harassed by an enemy using rudimentary guerrilla tactics on a marching column was demoralizing. The British began abandoning weapons, clothing, and material along the road, and the march back to Boston deteriorated into a route.

The retreating British column was joined by a fresh brigade of British troops in Lexington that had been dispatched to support the beleaguered British column, but the harassing fire continued through the villages of Menotomy (Later named Arlington) and Cambridge.

The British tried to defend the column with flanking patrols and artillery, but these efforts were ineffective in stopping the harassing fire of the American militia.

A fresh contingent of militia arrived from Salem and Marblehead, and had an opportunity to block the retreat and possibly annihilate the column, but the new commander was reluctant to commit his men into this battle of confusion and chaos without a thorough understanding of the situation. Thus the opportunity for an overwhelming victory was lost. The British retreated to Charlestown Neck, where Naval support provided a safe haven.

The victory was not as overwhelming as commonly thought, the British suffered only 250 casualties to 90 for the militia. Under the circumstances, the American marksmanship should have extracted a far higher casualty ratio, but in fairness, the weapon of the day was a smooth bore musket, a weapon more effective in volley fire than being used as a sniper rifle. However, the American minute men proved to the world, but more importantly to themselves, that they could stand up to the most powerful army in the world.

News of the battle reached London on May 28, and by the following summer the war for independence was fully engaged.

The Bundy Ranch confrontation may not have had strategic results, but Cliven Bundy captured the attention and the spirit of the American attitude present during the events leading up to the American Revolution. The frustration of seeing the ideal American male portrayed as the complacent metrosexual Pajama Boy by our progressive administration and its state-directed media leaves the American psyche looking for a modern example of the American hero.

Thus Cliven Bundy walks slowly to center stage. He is a nihilist in a sense, and refuses to compromise with a government he considers to be corrupt. Its not that our president wears mom jeans or a helmet for a ride on a bike that he and the rest of America have lost faith in our government, it is because everyone knows the system is corrupt and rigged. Anyyone who can read and isn’t a Socialist ideologue knows Lois Lerner conspired with the highest levels of our government to repress the Republican Party by using the IRS as a political thug bureaucracy. People know why the Democrats and our Attorney Eric Holder refuse to consider making people show an ID to vote; we and politicians only pretend that there are legitimate reasons not to show an ID to perform this sacred act of citizenship. Everyone knows our president can never be expected to tell the truth, when there is a perceived political advantage to be gained, political advantages like claiming a video caused the storming of the consulate in Benghazi or telling America we can keep our plans and doctors to make us complacent about our new federal health care extortion and refusing to call Islamic Terror by its proper name. Americans chafe at the special considerations given illegal aliens during traffic stops and the fraudulent forms for employment and government welfare. No lucid person believes that bringing in cheap unskilled labor will lessen unremitting unemployment numbers and an economy drowning in a government promoted malaise. The Fast and Furious debacle would be enough to impeach our attorney general and perhaps the president if it wasn’t for a Democrat controlled Senate. The frustration of wars fought and of victories wasted by an ideologue’s pollyanna view of foreign policy and of our enemy. Our energy policy seems designed to transfer America’s Wealth to the Middle East, the Green Energy policies are a way to reward the Obama bundlers with hundreds of millions, and the Stimulus only served to stimulate the wealth of the biggest players on Wall Street and the bankers. Yes, America is disillusioned and the rage is seething just beneath the surface.

To gather a few cattle and force a family off its ranch, our president puts snipers with 50 calibers and spotters to keep the cross hairs on unarmed horsemen, women, and children. Is Obama’s regime overstepping its authority?

Has the morality of middle class rural America come into conflict with the greed and immorality of America’s elites?

Yes, Cliven Bundy is a symbol of an America that is fast disappearing from our horizon. Men who supported families with a few hundred cattle and avoided the silliness of the modern metrosexual nonsense are no longer considered important by our state-directed media. Harry Reid has plans to convert the desert into solar farms in partnership with the Chinese Communists and the expense of the American taxpayer; damn the rancher, think of the desert tortoise. A creature that has existed with Bundy cattle for well over a hundred and twenty years. If Bundy and his clan won’t submit, President Obama has already converted bureaucrats of the BLM into his own impressive looking bunch of pretend storm troopers.

The hell with real lawbreakers, Occupy Wall Street was on the president’s side, illegal aliens will learn to vote Democratic, Democrats are more than willing to vote for the dead, but unarmed Cliven Bundy will face storm troopers armed with M16 rifles. A rifle whose bullet tumbles when it hits bone and tears an arm to leg off and leaves a shredded stump. Yes, this is the way our Progressive president directs his personal storm troopers against those who stand up to his corruption.

Yet we all know the IRS, the EPA, the NLRB, the FBI, and the Justice Department are all attack dogs for the Democrat Party, being persecuted by our government has become a mark of distinction for the honest man.

Bundy was defeated in court, but he has won in the hearts of Americans and the court of public opinion. He has awakened those feelings that inspired those patriots to overwhelm the British at the North Bridge and stand up to tyranny.