Rebuild the bulwark

By Andy Torbett

Ancient cities often built rings of fortifications around the outskirts of the cities, sometimes far beyond the city walls themselves, labyrinths meant to create confusing impenetrable barriers that could weaken the enemy’s onslaught before they reached the city. Similarly, we have built jetties or breakwaters along our coastlines designed to protect our vulnerable beaches and shorefronts from the fury of oncoming storms. The long mass of land protrudes out into the water splitting and breaking waves, dissipating their energy before they hit the weaker beaches behind it.

If these bulwarks are not maintained they began to fall into decay and the pieces of the construction, once meant to protect, are tossed by the storm’s waves accelerating the erosive power of the storm. When marauding armies would lay siege, they often would take pieces of ruinous walls and place them in their catapults to launch at the same city those ruins once protected. A dark irony to be sure when destruction comes in the remnants of your own design.

In a time long since past, conservatives relied upon the Republican Party to be that bulwark that stood against the onslaught of liberalism. But the Republican Party has tired and grown weary in recent years of the constant battery against its ramparts. It has slowly but steadily succumbed to the steady relentless waves of media and popular disdain crumbling until the bulwark now has become a mere ripple beneath the flowing current, with only a few pieces protruding stubbornly out of the water here and there. The storm moves past now unencumbered and unrelenting dragging the debris of the old bulwark along to hurl at the beaches of Liberty and the Constitution, eroding them away.

Now, the passage of time has offered the Republican Party an opportunity to rebuild the bulwark and stay the decay of it. One of the mighty immovable timbers of that bulwark has passed on. His passing is a bright clarion call to rebuild as his memory arrests us to our calling, our convictions. What now will we do?

Justice Antonin Scalia was that great bulwark. The Republican Party has this one opportunity to prove its mettle to the American people, where it has failed so much in the past. Prove to us that you will truly stand in the face of the storm and not relent. Do not allow this President to pick the replacement of so great a man and this could be the moment that turns the tide. The bulwark rebuilt again and trust restored again in The Grand Old Party.

The harbingers wait to see what these Republican leaders will do standing at this travois in the pathways of our time. Liberty does truly hang in the balance, a trembling, precarious balance indeed.

Andy Torbett of Atkinson writes a regular column entitled The Maine Conservative Voice. He can reached at  meconservativevoice@gmail.com.