By Andrew K. Boyle

It was a day as any other. In the middle of a prolonged war, soldiers wearily marched in company. There had been a string of losses, not entirely unexpected. Most people had predicted that the British troops, being the best in the world, would easily crush the rebel colonists of the newly self-proclaimed United States.

Among the company of rag-tag soldiers walked Thomas Paine, a civilian who had become famous by writing a popular pamphlet arguing the case for succession. He was accompanying the troops, observing and reporting the activities of war. As writers do, he became overwhelmed by ideas and took the drum of a cadet who was tapping the marching rhythm. On the drum head he began to write furiously. In the midst of a great jumble of words he wrote the famously enduring line "for these are the times which try men's souls." This line, written under unlikely circumstances, would become a hallmark of America, being oft repeated as history gave occasion to summon the wisdom springing from that dark day.

We have come to a place in American history of marching again in travail fashion, as our experiment in self-government seems to be ceding to the oppressive nature of history. Our republic is in peril, and these are thus once again the times which try men's souls.

The great tension in which we live is not political, though it is often expressed in political theater. Just as Mr. Paine was not as greatly troubled by the mounting losses on the battle field as he was worried that a nation conceived in liberty may crushed by history before it could change the trajectory of history; today it is not the mounting political losses which burden us, it is the loss of liberty which burden the soul. That said, the election of a new dear leader, or overturning Congress, defeating gun-grabbing legislation or even repealing ObamaCare will provide minimal relief for the suffering in America. Our hope will come elsewhere -- as will our cure.

We all know how the story of the War of Independence progressed from the day Mr. Paine scribbled on the drumhead. Within a few short months the tide began to surge behind the rebel colonists and we began to set up systems of governance as the burden of colonialism was lifted from our shoulders. Within a few years we began to enjoy the blessings of liberty -- forever changing the human story.

The ascent of America was swift and pronounced -- liberty interested persons began to flock to America seeking to understand how we lived. The greatest of these observers was Alexis de Tocqueville. His years traveling the new nation were canonized in Tomé, still republished and widely read today, as Democracy in America. In it, Tocqueville spends surprisingly little effort describing the American Constitution nor the federal government. Conversely, he generously provides detailed description of the American family, their faith and their unique sense of community. He is shocked, not by the separation of powers and majority representation in Congress, but at the eagerness in which Americans form civic organizations "at the drop of a hat" to respond to social ills and burdens. These intermediary institutions he credits with birthing the American way of life, the government of limited powers is simply a supporting institution.

Today our government is not a supporting institution for our civic organizations; cynically it is a rival institution. But just as in Tocqueville's time, when government was neither our great hope nor crowning achievement, today government is not our greatest liability nor responsible for our rapidly receding liberty -- it merely supports and encourages those transformations. The health and vigor of our civic institutions is a greater indicator of our interest in liberty than is the activities of our federal government.

One of the first things I noticed when moving to Oklahoma several years ago was the prevalence of such institutions and the refreshing crankiness of local politics. In the small town in which I became a resident, there was a great fuss concerning the cost of replacing our only stoplight with a new version containing a left-hand turn arrow. Those thousands of dollars roused more anger and interest than did to trillions of stimulus dollars debated a few short years later. Among the hundreds of residents there were a handful of boosters clubs, the Elks, Kiwanis, Rotary, Friends of the library, Friends of the Park, a branch of the Red-Cross and the Salvation Army just to name a few. I quickly questioned the availability of residents to staff all these organizations. The longer I lived in the Sooner State, the more I realized that this hat-dropping mentality was not unique to my small town, but was as unifying and common to the state as red-clay and OU football.

An interesting tension emerged over time as the state was infused with stimulus money and thusly begat projects. Highways were widened, new bridges forged, long and useless sidewalks were built around dry lakes and other instances of conspicuous government consumption began to dot the landscape. In time, this help was understood to establish control and require support on other more ambitious transformations. The federal government expected their generosity with things like shiny new bridges to garner our support of ObamaCare, health exchanges, gun registry and the like. Great burdens were placed on the citizens of Oklahoma as banks and companies were bailed out, sweeping new programs were passed, and agencies of regulations began to administer the American dream. In some states there was no tension, these progressions seemed natural and evolutionary in nature, but to a state with a rich panoply of civic organizations, these events were threatening to our liberty and seemed quiet unnatural.

The tension and anxiety birthed by the administrative state has pushed Oklahoma to be on the front lines of containing and limiting the federal government. The Sooner State has diverted great resources to challenging in court new statutes, mandates and burdens passed down from D.C. to the state capital. There has been widespread support, from the red-river to the Kansas border, and more impressively from Republican all the way to Democrats, for the Attorney General's office to spend the states wealth in efforts to curtail the federal government.

Recently, state Rep. Joe Dorman(D-Rush Springs) in a move some have describe as somewhat of a joke, proposed House Bill 2232 to establish a voluntary contribution as part of the Oklahoma state income tax, allowing people to donate a portion of their refund to a fund to support the Attorney General's office in pursuing constitutional challenges in court. The measure, which Dorman did not expect to be widely supported, passed the Oklahoma House 80-15 on March 5, and the Senate 36-3 on April 16. The bill was then returned to the House for consideration of Senate amendments. An admittedly minor political action was swiftly supported not out of political necessity, but as a direct result of a people who still respond to the evolving challenges of self-governance not by seeking sweeping legislation, but by simply dropping Mr. Tocqueville's hat.

This proposed legislation is in the same Providential nature as Paine scribbling on a drum-head while marching across the north east during a war his side was losing. It is in times of great anxiety when we stumble upon animating principles, and accident animated by Providence gives hope where all seems lost. In a state being overrun by an audaciously transformative government, a representative somewhat sympathetic and generally supportive of just such change accidentally reminds a self-governing people of their proud history of doing just that.

House Bill 2232 will do much more to remind people that a greater number of the hospitals and schools in Oklahoma were built and funded by citizens of the red-dirt than by the administrators in Washington, than it will ever provide dollars to fight those administrators. The willingness to support the measure is a sprig of hope, bursting through the red-clay to remind us that the harsh winter of regulation will give way to the warm spring of self-governance -- that liberty will again spring up and bloom on the plains of Oklahoma.

Make no mistake, these are still the times which try the souls of men, but accidental and minor events like these illuminate a great hope; that a government by the people, of the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. It has been gravely threatened before, as it is today, but the American way of life is worth defending, sometimes by voluntary check-off box. It is not the dollars raised, but the repeated assertion of the right and the ability of man to govern himself that is the great swell of hope which will again turn the tide of history in favor of those charged with guarding man's liberty.