The City Set On a Hill
So here we are in the beginning quarter of the 21st Century. In that 14 years we have managed to almost double the national debt, alienate most of our allies, keep our enemies laughing and now we are threatened with the total collapse of our culture and identity as our President unilaterally destroys our borders and our economy. We’re looking great! That is, if our utter destruction is the goal.
Barak Obama did not tell us 9 years ago what Hope & Change meant. We did not seem interested in pressing for a definition or for the goals he would pursue. We just grabbed our banners, stuck on our bumper stickers and waltzed to the orchestra of voices, marching ignorantly along in search of something better.
Well it is here. Once again we have clear experiential evidence of the contrasts between socialism and the free market. The free market wins hands down, but it may be too late to turn things around. Maybe! We have now tasted the bitter flavor of change and unemployment and confusion. We have watched scandal after scandal come marching by, any one of which would have had Richard Nixon before a firing squad. We have heard our President, Secretary of State, Attorney General, White house Staff and a host of others spin the stories of a dozen or more administrative failures, stacking up absurdities higher than the national debt. Lying is now not a no-no, or a crime or a treasonous act. They are an art form, delivered in choreographed sequence with background music and a flare for the dramatic. “I didn’t know until I heard it on TV…” is now a Broadway hit.
Now what do we do? How can we possibly clean up this failed presidency and repair the damage to our great nation? I think we may have finally moved past the tipping point. Newspapers who indorsed Obama and now scurrying to UN-indorse him. Supporters in his party are running as fast as they can so as not to be seen with him. Democrats running for office are asking him to not appear for their cause. It appears that even the uninformed low information voters are catching on. The personality cult of Messianic proportions is at an end and the setting for a crucifixion is gathering steam. President Obama has overplayed his hand, over changed the nation and may not be able to lend any support for the coming elections in 2014 and 2016.
The news tonight is terrible. The influx of illegals from the South has reached cataclysmic proportions. Our boarders are overrun and the reactions are devastating. We cannot take care of the masses coming over and the people are not going to relish listening to another amnesty speech. The amnesty bill is dying before our eyes as the end results is focused in x100 power proportions. Welcome to stupid! We can only conclude that there is more of it to come.
There was a time when we considered the foundations of the Republic to be principles, you know, truths of how things worked. They were laws of nature and of social order. But we allowed the highest office of the land to attack them, all of them, sequentially until we have a clear picture of why we followed them in the first place. We followed them because they worked and because they were true and because they were principles not suggestions or alternatives. Now, we have to find our way back.
Maybe this has been a good thing for our country, if there is any good to take from it. Possibly we will return to the foundations of our constitution and the blessings of the free market. Possible we can remember why we have three branches of government and why we believed in limited and restricted power in the hands of government. Maybe, just maybe, Barak Hussein Obama has move so fast and furious to the left that we understand the nature of extremes and the path to falling off of the cliff.
Someone is going to have quite a task ahead of them, and I suggest it is not going to be easy. In fact, if it is only a new president who will try to tackle the job alone, it will ruin him/her. It will have to be a commitment by the entire nation to turn around, attack the mess we are in and bring sanity and freedom back to our land.
Here’s to the American people. I think we can do it. But we will have to move together with energy and vision toward the “City Set on a Hill” that we have heard about in the past. It is out there, if we will move unitedly to create it.
Remember with me the vision we had as Ronald Reagan spoke faith into our hearts:
October 27, 1964 – Ronald Reagan said: “If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what’s at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.”
March 31, 1976 — from his “To Restore America” speech, which included one of many references to his experiences during the Depression
“No one who lived through the Great Depression can ever look upon an unemployed person with anything but compassion. To me, there is no greater tragedy than a breadwinner willing to work, with a job skill but unable to find a market for that job skill. Back in those dark depression days I saw my father on a Christmas Eve open what he thought was a Christmas greeting from his boss. Instead, it was the blue slip telling him he no longer had a job. The memory of him sitting there holding that slip of paper and then saying in a half whisper, ‘That’s quite a Christmas present,’ it will stay with me as long as I live.”
July 17, 1980 — from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention
“[The Democrats] say that the United States has had its days in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith.… My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.”
May 17, 1981 — from a speech at Notre Dame University
“The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism; it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
October 13, 1982 — in an address to the nation on the economy
“I have a special reason for wanting to solve this [economic] problem in a lasting way. I was 21 and looking for work in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression. And I can remember one bleak night in the thirties when my father learned on Christmas Eve that he’d lost his job. To be young in my generation was to feel that your future had been mortgaged out from under you, and that’s a tragic mistake we must never allow our leaders to make again.”
February 4, 1986 — from the State of the Union Address
“Government growing beyond our consent had become a lumbering giant, slamming shut the gates of opportunity, threatening to crush the very roots of our freedom. What brought America back? The American people brought us back — with quiet courage and common sense; with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.”
January 11, 1989 — farewell address to the nation
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life…. And how stands the city on this winter night? … After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true to the granite ridge, and her glow has held no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
Let us revive our vision, recover our spirits and move once again into a bright future, free from the restraints we have just experienced. Let’s build that City!
David Fritsche
General Editor
