In The Beginning

Never before have I been this interested in politics. My interest has grown geometrically like Al Gore's infamous Hockey Stick graph. Since time is finite and constant, this has naturally impacted my productivity in a negative way. But I have children. They mean a lot to me. It's my duty, I believe, to do whatever I can to make sure they have at least the same opportunities I've had to succeed. These opportunities did not just happen. Unlike Al Gore's ManBearPig, they really are man-made. They were purchased with blood, sweat and tears (not the musical group) over two hundred years ago.

America didn't have a normal delivery. It was more like an emergency caesarean section that didn't go well, but ended up breathing life into a healthy baby country. Despite British attempts to perform an abortion on the new nation, our forefathers bravely fought until victory was assured and independence was certain.

After they fought, they thought. You might say they Blogged. They knew what they didn't want their new country to become. It would not resemble any other place on Earth at that time, or at any time in man's history. It would be a place where people could live free; assemble and express opinions freely; share thoughts on paper freely; own land; make their own rules; and, in short, protect each citizen's rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Before my seventh birthday, I lived in the 1950's. This was a very interesting time to be alive in America. It was a time of great pride because we had recently defeated not one but two evil dictators who were hell-bent on world domination. Our enemies were on opposite sides of the planet physically, and on the opposite side of liberty and freedom, philosophically. The war was difficult, but America met the challenge. We were the heroes of the world who had come to rescue peace-loving people from tyranny and persecution. They saw what America was able to accomplish and stood in awe of it's might. That made every American very proud, and as a result, they worked hard to push our country to new heights. They built roads and bridges. They expanded railroads and ship yards. They pushed skyscrapers  ever higher until the man-made mountains of our largest cities could be seen miles away, while their impact was felt around the world. Oh, and people were so happy and proud, they had plenty of time to produce babies. So many babies, in fact, that the population surge they created was given a name: Baby Boomers. I was one of them.

During my school years I watched things change. In the 1960's, the doo-wop music on my little transistor radio turned into something else. They called it the British Invasion. We'd had one of those a couple of hundred years before and it was nasty, even though it ended pretty well. But this one was much more fun. It was led by an army of clean cut kids with bad teeth and haircuts that looked like mops. They spoke with an accent that intellectuals to this day automatically associate with intellect. Did you ever notice how people who try to sound intelligent take on a British accent? The music was still the same, but different. Mostly it was about love. Love desired; love acquired; love abandoned; love unrequited. But one thing I noticed was that these invaders didn't share my feelings about America. Instead of being the proud policemen who sailed across the Atlantic to help beat back the Nazi devils, they were the victims who we saved. Most people didn't even remember how just a century and a half earlier, these folks were the ones we were trying to escape.

Folk music crept into popular music and changed the soundtrack of my life. We'd gotten ourselves in trouble as the policemen of the world trying to beat back more evil dictators in a distant land called Vietnam. The place was full of cities we couldn't pronounce and a culture that was completely alien to ours. This wasn't like the big war. It wasn't even like Korea, which was basically an echo of the big war fought with leftover equipment and soldiers. This new war didn't pull our country together like the big one did. It left many people wondering why were there at all. Folk music evolved into protest music and, when embraced by young minds full of mush, like me, it helped divide the country.

The division was sold to us as peace-loving youth versus an older generation of war lovers. Never trust anyone over thirty. But the culture it created wasn't all that peaceful. There were violent protests, and they escalated until four college kids lay dead on the campus grounds in a place near my home called Kent. The war was quickly shut down and we moved along like nothing ever happened. But something did happen. Radicals were born, and those radicals studied the radicals who came before them and became the evil dictators of countries we never wanted to emulate. I didn't know it at the time, but America had been infected by people with an agenda. There were Progressives among us. Joseph McCarthy called them out, but he was quickly squelched. Those intent on taking America in a different direction had already gained enough power to wrestle enough control to keep themselves alive.

The distant war was over, but the fighting never stopped. It just moved into America. It was a stealth war fought with the very freedom of speech we took for granted. As I started my adult life in the 1970's, politics became more real for me. I had an opportunity to vote, but I took that about as seriously as I did my homework in school. Not much. I remember going in to vote not knowing anything at all about the names on the ballot. I'd just pick the names that sounded most "American" to me. By the laws of probability, I'm sure I got it wrong half the time.

As the 1980's passed, I watched America move back toward those good old days of the 1950's, at least a little bit. We'd just tossed out a President who seemed to embrace the Progressive ideas that were still bubbling under the collective consciousness of most Americans. We knew something was wrong because gasoline started to cost a lot more money, and short supplies meant standing in long lines at the pump, sometimes not being able to fill up. That didn't sit well with folks like me who were used to racing their hot rods in the streets at night. Something was wrong, and we all knew we needed a "good" man to get it fixed. Along came Ronald Reagan. A good man.  He may have been the first guy I ever voted for on purpose. I liked what he had to say as much as I liked the way he said it. My friends didn't agree with me. We were starting to go in different directions. I like to think I was getting more mature, while most of them slid into a plateau and stopped growing up.

I started a business in the 1980's, mostly by accident, and watched it set down roots and blossom into something bigger than I'd ever expected. Maybe it was just coincidence, but I still credit some of my success to the big man in the white house. Ronald Reagan, I believe, kept big government away so I could get on with the business of growing a business. He gave me back some of my hard-earned pay so I could expand and hire more people. Instead of just feeding my family, which had just expanded to three people, I was now able to feed multiple families. It was an exciting time and I never wanted it to end.

I wasn't happy to see Bill Clinton become President in the 1990's, but I didn't think of it as a tragedy. I trusted our system of government to keep the Federal government arms length away from me and my business. But when his wife started conducting secret meetings right away with the intent to suck the health care industry into a bigger central government, I got more concerned. Hillary made me pay closer attention to politics. I thought Bill was just a big dumb hick lawyer who was having some fun at the taxpayers expense. Turns out, I was right. I watched very closely when his sexual indiscretions started to come to light. I had a good feeling about what was going on. It was entertaining to watch on the then-new 24/7 news channels. The President I didn't like very much was going down. All the while, I came to admire Newt Gingrich and his Contract for America. When I hear people talk about Clinton being impeached for having sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, I always try to correct them. He was impeached for lying under oath. That's a thing a lawyer knows all about, and certainly not something you want your President doing. But, here it is more than a decade later and lots of people still get this point wrong. That has to be a red warning flag of some kind, don't you think?

When my kids started going to school, I was fortunate enough to be able to send them to private school. I watched as public schools went from the healthy learning environments I wasted my time attending to indoctrination centers run by those Progressives who were now growing stronger. The infection was spreading. I started to wonder how we were ever going to cure it. I assumed America would heal itself. I still had faith in the Constitution. It would see us through. The invaders, I thought, might always be around as a chronic low-level infection, but I didn't see the disease being terminal.

The new century brought with it some real crazy stuff. I watched the towers fall in New York City in real time on my television. People I knew, who I had met while working in that great city, died in that building. New York was my city, at least for several months back in the 1980's when I helped launch a new radio station there. I worked in the Monkey Building (Empire State), up on the 86th floor above the first observation level. I sat in the open window eating lunch sometimes, gazing in awe at the carpet of humanity below and the vast array of skyscrapers all around. New York City made me proud. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. That's true. That song doesn't lie. I'm here to tell you.  But someone had just attacked my adopted city, and in doing so, they wounded me as well. I would never be the same after that. I started to take politics even more seriously.

When Barack Obama got elected, I felt at first a little proud that America had finally sent petty racial discrimination to the graveyard. We elected a guy who wasn't white. That was historic. But, I was also very concerned. In our haste to make a change of any kind, we also elected a guy who didn't seem to have the experience needed to do the job, or at least do it well. When I found out that Mr. Obama had also been a devout Progressive, I really began to take politics seriously. In fact, it threw me into panic mode. I remember hearing the election results while sitting on an airplane somewhere over Germany. I turned to my friend and told him I wasn't happy about the news. I think I was the only person on that airplane who felt that way. But I'm sure they all know what I meant now. He's demonstrated that my worst fears had been underestimated. Things were actually worse than I thought. My country was being fundamentally transformed by a Progressive. The disease had taken hold of the body. The condition was upgraded to critical. It's time for me to learn enough political medicine to see if I can help save my country, just as my dad helped save Europe and Asia in the 1940's. This is war, and like the big one, the impact will be felt all over the world. We must prevail. Never give up. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, that's almost the only thing.

I've started this blog to think out loud about how we can stamp out the infection. I fully expect opposition as well as support. Feel free to leave your comments. If you are obnoxious, rude, vulgar, or stupid, that's ok. You won't make ME look bad if you do that. But you'll tell us all we need to know about YOU. If you'd prefer a healthy debate, I'm up for the challenge. Give it a go. Let's see if we can wiggle our way out of this mess and get back to the Leave It To Beaver days when government was smaller and life was a whole lot bigger and better.