MISSION STATEMENT

NARLO's mission is to begin the long process of restoring, preserving and protecting Constitutional property rights and returning this country to a Constitutional Republic. Government has done a great job of dividing us up into little battle groups where we are essentially impotent at a national level. We will change all that with the noisy voices and the vast wealth tied up in the land of the American rural landowner. The land is our power, if we will just use that power, before we lose it. We welcome donations and volunteers who believe as we do, that government abuses against rural landowners have gone on for far too long and a day of reckoning is at hand.

I, as President of the National Association of Rural Landowners, am but a humble writer who believes deeply in freedom and liberty; a freedom and liberty for the individual. An individual freedom and liberty that is natural, as comes from nature, not from governments; a freedom and liberty that was envisioned by our Founding Fathers and codified into the law of man through our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. I believe that when governments, or groups of people attempt to stifle freedom and liberty, or remove man from them, man's progress through time is depressed and he retreats further backwards into depravity, immorality and serfdom. I believe that freedom and liberty are our strengths not our weakness and if we inhibit freedom and liberty by any means, we as a people become weaker. If we as a people become weaker, we lose our creative ability, we lose our ingenuity, we lose our industriousness, we lose our productivity, we lose our can-do spirit, we lose our pride in our accomplishments, we lose our strength and courage to right a wrong when we see it and we lose our generosity. We believe that if the people look to government to solve their problems and acquiesce to its unauthorized power, they abdicate their duty and responsibility to control their own lives and hand it over to a collective. Having done so, they are no longer free men. And further, they empower and encourage the government to usurp even greater power.

If someone comes along and steals your car or other prized possession, or harms a family member, any of us would be angry and seek justice for the perpetrator. Most would call the police and ask for their assistance. Others might be so angry they would take matters into their own hands and seek their own justice. But let the government come along and steal your freedom and liberty and we roll over and say "what can I do?". So why does freedom and liberty have less of a value than your car, or injury to a loved one? Is it because we can't define freedom and liberty? Is it because the government is now too powerful and we risk our own well-being if we call into question government's actions or their authority for those actions? Have we become so soft and afraid of consequences that we would sacrifice liberty for security? Would we prefer slavery to freedom? Has the bar of courage sunk so low, that we would allow a rope to be put around our necks without so much as a whimper? Is the price of peace appeasement, conciliation and pacification? Or are we so blind that we can't see the freight train of socialism, radical environmentalism, the one-world-order and world domination by religious-driven fascism, bearing down upon us at high speed?

Ronald Reagan, in a speech in 1964 said:

"I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam (now Iraq) and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars (now Islamo-Fascism) and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers." (This was said by Ronald Reagan in 1964, 42 years ago and unfortunately not enough were taking heed.)
"Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to." In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."

"You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."

Billions of words on freedom and liberty have been proffered since that speech and billions of words were proffered before it. Throughout our history, millions of brave American soldiers have sacrificed their lives, limbs and minds in defense of our freedom. But words and sacrifices, in and of themselves, cannot change ignorance, or apathy, or a misguided mindset, or a purposeful desire to self-destruct. In spite of those words and in spite of that massive sacrifice, each day we allow ourselves to slide deeper and deeper into the abyss of socialism and radical environmentalism and the people who call themselves free Americans watch silently as this ship of freedom and liberty slips quietly into the depths of a man-made Hell on Earth, self-induced bondage.

I can only say that he who watches in paralyzed fear, or refuses to acknowledge a clear and present danger without defending his person, his life and his freedom, deserves to die. Is that America's fate? Are we doomed by our own ignorance and apathy? Or does peace at any cost, including enslavement, have a greater value than freedom and liberty?

Even though we are growing in number, there are still way too few of us because so many have been bought off by the fleeting and flimsy promises of government. Will you please join with us and others in the defense and the pursuit of your own and that of all America's freedom and liberty, before it is too late? Let this next year be the year that people seek freedom over comfort and they pursue liberty over security. The future of your children and grand children rest in your hands. You would do anything for them. Then why not preserve, protect and defend freedom for them as the greatest of all gifts? The fate of individual freedom and liberty and the final fate of America hang in the balance.

Ron Ewart