There is something hideously wrong with America today, isn’t there? There is a sickness running rampant among us, a communicable disease seemingly with no cure, rotting us from the inside. For years everyone has been pointing the finger, even that most offensive central digit, at everyone else, shifting the blame from “me” to “you”. It can’t possibly be my ideals, can it, that have brought us to the brink of chaos and financial ruin—no, no, those are your responsibility. You conservative. You liberal. You green freak. You independent. You libertarian. You communist, you socialist. It’s all your fault.
I have an idea in regard to political reform. Actually quite a few ideas, but there is a common starting point for all of them, and that is this: If we are to survive as a nation of individuals we must stop avoiding our own political process and engage our government before it overthrows us completely. I cannot believe, in this nation forged from the very marrow of the bones now rotting, crying out from hallowed and monumental graves in our national places of honor, that we could be so continually, willfully arrogant. We trample the heritage our forebears purchased for us with pain, sacrifice, terrible hardship, suffering, and extreme endurance as we slumber in excessive contempt for any expenditure of effort on our part to maintain America’s exceptional place in the world. Half of us, though we have the right to vote, cannot somehow muster the strength to exercise it, ever. We need to own the fact that we have been making excuses for far too long. If you don’t like any of the candidates, write yourself in. You might learn something.
For far too long far too many of us have been settling for whatever we feel we deserve or can get through some form of taxpayer funded welfare. This kind of welfare is not, contrary to popular belief, generosity. It is extortion. It is a lie. If a man can get a thing for free, he will, every time. But he is not formed, he is not stretched, he is not forced by conditions to adapt, to improvise, to overcome those obstacles in life that, in the traversing of them, make a man smarter, leaner, better-equipped, and more able for the next.
America, we need to own our failure as a collection of individuals who have lost our way among the consumable goods with which we have surrounded ourselves. Our life now comes to us, hand-delivered, prepackaged, homogenized, processed, disinfected, and lifeless. This generation of Americans does not know what hardship is. We do not know suffering. We have no concept of pain or failure or endurance. We have never been forced to create anything. We simply use. And as users, we have become addicted to the slumber we are now in.
If we are to awake from this, we must admit that we are the problem. There is more we could be doing to be the change we want to see. We don’t want to see change for its own sake, either. We have definitive values by which we live our lives, values that line up very nicely with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, by the way, even though those documents are 230 years old. Their age does not make them irrelevant; not in a republic, which is what America is. We are not a democracy, in which the mob rules, however disconnected from reality they may be. We are a republic, in which our founding charter provides the bedrock on which a strong and resilient nation can build mighty things of great worth, and quite apart from governmental intervention. We are weak because we have ceased to be the nation we were founded to become. Our constitution has not been honored with our consent to operate by its tenets for very many long years.
We need to take ownership of the fact that America is failing today. We need to own that the fault lies with us, for having been so very delinquent in being the people we were called to be. We need to move forward by engaging the system of government our founders gave us by their brute toil. Our government has become obscenely hard of hearing, America. Ascend the high places and shout with one voice, to cause them to tremble in the control room of our once great republic. It is time now.
It is time for us to demonstrate peaceably, assemble, dissent, use every available avenue of approach to unseat what amounts to a cancerous growth in the power center of our government. Sign petitions, publish written works, record music, write poetry, create art, litigate our values, speak out with associates and friends in regard to our values, do not allow this “Change” administration to hide behind its propagandist mouthpiece—dig for the truth about what they are attempting to hide and then trumpet it as loudly as possible to whomever has ears to hear.
It is time for our government officials to become statesmen again, to become public servants. It is time for them to work for free. No more paychecks, no more lobbyist-funded trysts or kickbacks, no more tax exempt retirement plans. Our federal branches of government should all work for us for free.
It is time for us to fire the bums who are responsible for this ginned up financial “crisis” and install quality men of integrity, wisdom and understanding at the helm of our federal government by voting them in next year.
America, it is time to stand up and be counted among those who will no longer sit idle, sleeping, consuming. It is time to engage. It is time for accountability from our servants—our public servants. It is time for us to be what our forefathers died to secure for us. It is time to speak out. It is time to awaken, to pay attention, and, in 2010, to vote.
