The passing of former President Ronald Reagan gave the people of the United States an opportunity to go back and look at some better days, at some quieter and yet stronger leadership that took us out of the defeatism and near despair of the 1970’s and the year 1980, up to the election of that year. We were a nation not as violent within as today, but sinking in financial woes and struggling against our worst fears of a crumbling Soviet Union that was keeping a proud face to the world outside.
America has had a full week of looking at itself under the leadership of a man who could be angry and yet not give way to egregious fits of temper or lose his sense of balance in the face of mixed messages, harsh criticism, the beginning of terrorism, and a world showing early signs of mass insanity that have since matured into killing rages and murderous madness. Just for a week, and doubtless recalling none of the frustrations or weaknesses of the actual days, we glimpsed an overview of a strong America led by the genial President Reagan and allied with the Iron Lady, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Some Americans could not go back by way of recollection, they are too young to have any recollection of Mr. Reagan as the president, only as a former president. They didn’t study his life and times, but they heard of his motion picture career (maybe) and that he was the president who told Mr. Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Those four words are probably the most-remembered four words that Mr. Reagan ever spoke. But, the wall did come down shortly after the end of his second term as the American president.
Tomorrow, we shall have to face today once again. We are still the nation the Arabs hate, the Europeans disrespect, the Asians hope to overrun, and the Canadians despise. We are the nation with the open southern border, an unthinkable state blunder in the eyes of many Americans. We are the nation to whom the leadership no longer listens as far as the voices of the people. We, the federal republic created by founders of great vision and wisdom, are now a de facto oligarchy run by billionaires in and out of office.
The antithesis of oligarchy was another part of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a man from a small American town, poor as the proverbial churchmouse, who was destined to greatness and became the embodiment of the American dream. A poor boy with holes in his shoes could one day be not only part of Hollywood, but part of America’s political scene, change his party affiliation, glean the principles of conservatism from the late Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and combine it with his rich spiritual heritage and deep personal faith in God, to be a man of God and of the people as the American president!
He was not flawless nor would he have claimed to be. He was resolute, and adept at building us up to think more highly of ourselves as people with a future rather than merely a glorious past. He was not a man who made no mistakes, but made the best of them and went ahead to face another day with the optimism that his God would lead him in the proper way, and that through the thorns he would find the roses in our nation. Others have spoken enough of his virtues, now we as Americans must look at tomorrow, for we are not the same people Mr. Reagan left behind when he left the Oval Office to his successors.
This is now an embattled nation from within and from without, deeply divided between liberalism and neo-conservatism, having for the most part tossed aside God by judicial fiat and special interests, reeling from the staggering debts of war and the battle of the dollar vs. the Euro, and giving ground to the galloping globalism that threatens the planet with a one world government.
True conservatism is the belief in small federal government that meddles not in the affairs of the people. It is fiscal conservatism that believes in small and balanced federal budgets. It is the belief that the government is not your mother or even your step-mother, it is force, lethal force and diplomatic force, protecting the nation against attacks from without and subversion from within, but within the limits prescribed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
That is not the government in power today. Everyone in office, save a few, believes in big government and big spending. Most believe in war, meddling wars without sufficient justification by way of the “clear and present danger” doctrine. Our leaders can go to church for a national funeral service and not much else save a national disaster when people are inclined to look to the God they have otherwise forgotten.
Our present leadership and the opposition, the presumptive opposition candidates, are all too busy trying to be the leaders they are not gifted to be, they are politicians with either aggressive or perhaps passive tendencies who are aiding and abetting the causes of globalism rather than leading America back to its status as a great sovereign nation comprised of sovereign states. Our leadership, if it has read the works of the founders, has discarded them as obsolete, and the judiciary has become secular humanist in the midst of a nation floundering to find some moral compass, having tossed aside the one given us by our forefathers.
Now is the time for a true leader of the people to rise again and find us in our sorrows, lift up our sagging chins, and assure us that victory is ahead because we shall have reverted to the ways that made us great.
I see no such person on the horizon.
Thus tomorrow we shall have to face the today that each new day brings, and face the person in the mirror in front of us. Close to 300 million Americans (and illegal aliens of uncertain numbers) will have to look to the American leadership to take us out of a war in which we embroiled ourselves on false pretenses or false information (the result is the same), to restore to America its lost jobs and soaring costs of medical care, a nation that has cast aside family values and speaks of them as if they were America’s norm. We have to look at the fact that for a week we had something grandiose on the television set that returns to the abysmal and debauched.
Everything in our founding documents flies in the face of almost everything that is being done in America now, and we brush the old documents aside and move on into that brave new world of ambiguity and equivalence. We seek answers from telescopes, probes and rovers, but not from the God of our forefathers. We cry for leadership to remove the yokes from our necks so that we can use our property, feel relief from our tax burdens, teach the children according to our values rather than federal indoctrination, and keep the children safe from the drug cartels that operate above the laws we use to catch the lowly street dealers.
Who are we?
In November of 1980 A.D. the American people, sick of the so-called leadership of that day, elected a president who gave them hope and vitality. We do not have that choice in 2004, merely the lesser of the evils as we perceive it, or the vote of our conscience for someone who speaks as we would speak if the microphone were ours and the government employees were truly public servants.
Tomorrow we shall face the today that all tomorrows become. How long we will endure as a people sharply divided and heavily burdened, threatened on every side by evils from terrorism and economic perils from the money cartels only God knows, but we do not ask Him to spare us. We are far too secular for that, and whimper at the injustices being done but do not seek the Source of all Good to empower us to defeat those evils.
There is still an evil empire out there, one that moves forward using various peoples, religions and movements as tools for but one end, to rule the world. It is that evil that we now must meet and overcome.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”