By: William B. Nees Nick (Get_Involved)
How many of us has had a machine that breaks down so many times that we get tired of repairing it, so we lay it aside and go down to the store and buy another one like it. We bring it home and take it out of the crate; now the future's been added to it, we'll call that the Bells and Whistles. This particular machine does more than the other one did. We open it up and take it out of the crate and inside the crate there's a little book called an Owners Manual. What do most of us do with it? Most of us lay it aside and some of us even throw it away.
Now 6 months later a friend comes over and says "I didn't know you had this machine" and you reply "Yeah I bought it about 6 months ago". "The friend will say did you know it would do this"? "No man I didn't know it would do that". "Let me show you something". So he'll walk over to the machine, press the button, twist the knob and turn the crank and then show you something about the machine you didn't know it would do.
Now in reality that's called In Home Schooling. Or maybe your just sitting there on a boring day, the wife has gone downtown, there's nothing on TV, and you don't feel like listening to music, your mad at the world 'cause you couldn't go fishing. So you look over there at the Owners Manual, and you pick it up and start thumbing through it. Now most of it you know, but all of a sudden one of those paragraphs jump out at you and just slap you right in the mind and your mind will say "Huh, I didn't know my machine would do this". Well it's at that point right there that self education gets involved and you start re-reading that paragraph.
We get the paragraph looking like English, Greek, or Spanish or what ever language we understand get up out of your chair, walk over to the machine, press the button, twist the knob and turn the crank and the machine does what the book it says it's gonna' do. Well you play with it for a few minutes, and shut it down and walk back over to your chair, sit down and scratch your head and say "well I'll be a son-of-a-gun, I got myself a better machine than I thought I had".
Well, brings us to this point in time 233 years ago; there were 56 assemblers, they worked in a factory. The name of that factory was Liberty Hall. They built the machine. They named it The United States of America. They wrote an Owners Manual to it and laid it up on a shelf called the Library for the owners of the machine and any new buyers, such as future generations and foreigners who buy the machine could have an Owners Manual to learn how to operate it. But how many of us with jealousy, hatred and animosity in our soul can't see the forest for looking at the trees, will read Louis L'Amours' "Budweiser Cans and Fish Hooks", and then complain about how the great machine is running?
