We are guilty of not paying attention.
It’s our fault.
We got wrapped up in our lives, in our own personal problems, and we let the men and women we sent off to Washington and the state capitals stray off of the straight and narrow path and get the idea that they run our states and the country. They don’t. We do; at least we are supposed to, in this representative republic. But we have not been paying attention.
While we were working hard and building homes and raising families they were feathering their own nests at our expense, and the country’s.
Show me a Senator who has served more than two terms in Washington who is not a millionaire.
Show me a Representative who has served more than a decade in Washington that is not a millionaire.
Show me a President who does not leave the White House a millionaire. The days of a Harry Truman, who left his second term in the White House, got in the family car with Bess, and drove himself back to Independence, Missouri, to move back into his mother-on-law’s house are long gone.
Power corrupts, and for that it uses money.
The days of men and women who went to mayor’s officers, statehouses or Washington determined to try their best to faithfully represent their constituents back home, to lead this nation in the paths of righteousness, and who had character and principles, are long gone. Now we have whole families, generation after generation, who spend their working lives in “public service”, who consider elected office “the family business”. We have had our fill of the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Bayhs, the Bushes, the Tafts, the Cuomos, the Gores, the Sununus, the Udalls, the Dodds, the Longs, the Landrieus, the Murkowskis, the Daleys, the Clintons…
This nation was born in fire, it fought a bloody 8-year revolution to get shet of a dictatorial king and a hereditary aristocracy, but we have finally come back around to our own domestic royalty who have special privileges and are not like us.
There was a time when this nation, conceived in liberty, was a shining beacon on a hill for the rest of the world. Most of the people of the world admired us and for many their goal was to come here and be a part of our national story, to raise their children here in the land of liberty and plenty, where hard work could build a home and no one had to be afraid. Now our government monitors all of our phone calls and our emails, violating our privacy in the name of “security”. Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Now our so-called President openly boasts about how good he is at having armed drones kill people in countries with which we are not at war. A few hundred innocent women and children are the price he is willing to pay to terminate individuals, even unindicted, untried American citizens, who are on his enemies list.
I am not a dumb guy. I have an advanced degree. I wore my nation’s uniform proudly for more than 22 years, and spent more than 8 years overseas in her name, guarding it from afar. I taught U.S. History and Government for 17 years, I understand our governmental system. I used to believe in it. Now, more and more, I am ashamed of it, and I see no hope for it and us.
Our elected representatives knowingly ignore our wishes and assume that they know better than we what is good for us. That is not American, and in fact bears a strong resemblance to the Marxist concept of a “Vanguard of the Revolution”, a special group of elite leaders who should lead the ignorant “narod” (That’s what the Russians called their peasants; nowadays we refer to them as “low-information voters”…) to a better life.
We live in the last days of Rome. Or Babylon…
(The above piece was written by Kinnison, an American patriot, whom I’ll simply call another one of the good guys still left in America. Thanks for allowing me to post this on my blog!)
