Posted: November 12, 2011

By Anita Crane

Harry McKay, portraying Patrick Henry

Barack Obama campaigned during the 2008 presidential race on hope and change, and while change has been delivered, hope has vanished, according to groups of veterans who staged a protest in Washington to emphasize their demands that Obama and his entourage of “czars” resign.

Portraying Patrick Henry, Harry McKay spoke the famous words of that notable patriot, who expressed his frustration at trying to deal with a monarchy then.

He said, “We have done everything that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope.”

There were, observers said, at most a couple hundred attending the rally assembled for the Declaration to Restore the Constitutional Republic by the Veteran Defenders of America and its parent organization, The United States Patriots Union.

But during McKay’s reading, literally dozens of passersby stopped to listen to the oration that once called on Americans to stand firm in their resistance to the tyranny of England. Today, it was meant as a call for patriots to stand firm in support of America, and in resistance to what the organizations have described as a Washington government run amok.

Henry’s rousing revolutionary cry came in 1775 at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Va. At today’s rally, applause and cheers interrupted key passages of the oration.

“It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope,” McKay exclaimed, but, “If we wish to be free if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending²if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight!”

It is in the conclusion of Henry’s address that he uttered the famous, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

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