A generation shakes its fist at God and memorializes its rebellion on a bumper sticker: “Question Authority.”

A teen-aged youth lies dead after a senseless confrontation in a neighborhood where homeowners are vexed at the inability to protect their property from brazen disregard for authority.

Well, does it feel that your life’s
become a catastrophe
Oh it has to be for you to grow boy
And when you look through the years
and see what you could have been
Oh what you might have been –
if you’d had more time

So when the day comes
to settle down
Well who’s to blame
if you’re not around
You took the long way home
Took the long way home…..
(from Take The Long Way Home by SuperTramp)

Trayvon, we hardly knew ye … but we know thee well. You are the product of a misplaced faith. “Baby Boomers”, a generation that confused liberty and its attendant duties with licentiousness and its disregard of moral restraints, is now the generation writing mountains of regulations that vigorously restrain your life. All the while draining the life out of our national character, freedom and opportunity.

Let me be clear: You and your generation are not victims. Every human being has a God-born responsibility to seek truth. Here is a truth too late for you to realize: God, your Father, wanted you and loved you into existence; it was your life, a gift from the creator of all men.

With it came an inborn duty to improve your essential property, to create something of value that improves the lives of others. It was your duty to learn to live in community and contribute to the commonwealth of our great nation. It was your duty to respect the two essentials of liberty: the right of private property and the rule of law. It was your duty to become a true man.

The president is trying now to convince me that because I’m not a black person I won’t be able to understand why you were susceptible to dying such a violent death. For some reason he forgets that I, like you, am a man. The Founding Fathers of this country truly believed that principles like “All Men Are Created Equal" are woven into the fabric of our common manhood. Certainly we’re not all equal in talent or ability, but equal in God’s sight and in the sight of the law. My ancestors believed in it enough to shed their blood for your ancestor’s freedom. I don’t know if they liked black people, but I do know this: they and tens of thousands of good, decent men loved these principles and gave their lives to live them out. We owe it to them at least to keep striving within ourselves to be the same calibre of man; to live up to that ideal, of laying down our lives for one another, of making this a nation of the True & Free.

Because if we don’t then your life will be just another statistic, or worse, a justification for the rule-mongers to keep piling on more of their rules, smug in their self-gratification that they are "doing something.” No longer content to simply shake their fists in the face of God, but institutionalizing their folly, they promote policies that erode our national character by diminishing you and your generation of purposeless wanderers to something like materialistic zombies only interested in the things between your teeth.

Some of us won’t let you become the poster child for anarchy. As a man, created in the image of God, the best thing we can take from your senseless death and the thousands of your generation being left for dead by evil men and impostors masquerading as competent authority, is to get a tighter grip on our convictions and renew our pledge to America’s Manifest Destiny.