After a political loss, leftists do not simply lick their wounds and accept the voice of the people. The stakes in yesterday's 'immigration reform' defeat will magnify beyond all reason the leftist penchant to attack, subvert and destroy those who took victory from their grasp. Elitists, after all, were destined to rule, to dictate, to dole out largesse to the masses. And when the masses do not place them in the positions of power to which they have been called, elitists become enraged, and insatiably vindictive. Civility and law/truth/justice find themselves obscured by the obsession to gain the power that was not won through the normal channels that representative republican government supplies.
We won a victory yesterday. But the citizen activism that was required in order to secure that victory represented a dramatic departure from the norm. We need to fan that activist spark into a flame in order to wrest the reins of power from the growing 'leadership' contingent in Washington that no longer believes in representative government.
Citizenship in a free society requires allegiance, education, strength, endurance, courage, resolve, and action. But it does not require the wearing of rose-colored glasses. Until our leadership addresses the illegal alien problem, until the number of voters who feed at the government socialist welfare/entitlement trough (as forewarned by deTocqueville) can be dramatically reduced, and until we determine to educate our children as to their proud heritage and the dangers posed by relinquishing it, the majority of election and legislation results will continue to fall in favor of powerful liars who can voice the biggest promises to the host of least informed minds.
I posted the essay below (‘A Day for Celebration’) on another website yesterday, and one of the commenters stated that I ought to be more grateful for all the good things President Bush has done (followed by a list of several dozen of the president’s ‘accomplishments’).
I have often written that the factor that is most contributing to our republic’s demise is fact that the majority of Americans simply don’t care. The sense of responsibility (the responsibility to see that we are informed about our proud heritage, to see that we understand the integral part that each of us needs to play in maintaining our liberties and our national sovereignty … and the responsibility to pass those qualities on to our children) that was once an innate and irrevocable part of citizenship has eroded beyond the ability to identify it.
The traditional American values of individual responsibility and civic duty blossomed, in part, from our roots as a frontier society in which everything had to be created from scratch. The old-fashioned sense of ‘community’ that people experienced was never a substitute for personal responsibility. It was a non-necessary, but comfortable, adjunct to it.
Nowadays there are those who are educated, but non-discriminating. They see what Bush has ‘accomplished’, but do not recognize that the large majority of those ‘accomplishments’ are either borderline unconstitutional, or toothless.
Such was the case with the poster I referenced above. He cannot see the forest for the trees. He does not recognize that his list of the president’s ‘accomplishments’ is dwarfed, if not negated, by his all-out support of the recent abominable sovereignty- and economy-undermining 'immigration legislation'.
Without a sense of citizen responsibility, and citizen discernment, a free society’s days are numbered. And, once it is lost, I don’t know how it can be reclaimed.
Post-9/11, there was a flicker of reclamation, but it was never fanned into a flame. Too many diversionary bread-and-circus tactics continually mounted by the mainstream media, Hollywood, and academia. And we allowed ourselves to slip back into our apathetic stupor once again before the year was out.
No sooner does an Anna Nicole Smith story run its (months-long) course, than a Paris Hilton story is waiting in the wings to take its place. If you believe that the emphasis on celebrities without character, and the virtual ignoring of stories of genuine heroism (examples of which occur every day in Afghanistan and Iraq), represent innocent oversights, think again. They are blatant examples of the powers that be succeeding in diluting the public’s responsibility to know, to learn and to care about what really matters.
While driving to an out-of-state appointment the other day, my husband and I were listening to what passes for the on-the-hour five minute ‘news’ report on one of the major (ABC?) affiliates. On that particular day, two sentences were devoted to the fact that the last remaining survivor of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima had passed away. I was so stunned by the brevity and flippant nature of the report that I literally counted the number of sentences devoted to the next ‘story’. It was the ‘story’ of the imminent release of Paris Hilton from jail. And it merited eight full sentences of coverage – four times more than the death of an esteemed member of our ‘greatest generation’.
My husband and I looked at each other, and, without a word being said, simply shook our heads in unspoken agreement that the contents of that five-minute ‘news’ segment represented a microcosm of the ‘bread and circuses’ death knell that the mainstream media is foisting upon the citizenry, each succeeding generation of which knows and appreciates the ‘real America’ less and less than the one that went before.
None of what ails us – from the threat of international terrorism, to the nightmare of illegal immigration, to the unprecedented power of the unelected, unaccountable mainstream media, to the Marxist influence in public education, to the corrupting power of special interest groups, to the purposeful, premeditated destruction of the best healthcare system the world has ever known … -- none of those gargantuan problems could continue to exist if we as a people began to re-value the attendant individual responsibilities that come with being a citizen of a free country: namely being educated and informed, seeking and respecting truth, and demanding accountability from our leadership.
As a nation of free men, we are choosing to die by suicide, because no malevolent force, from within or outside of our borders, can do us as much harm as our own indifference.
No people will tamely surrender their liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the contrary, when people are universally ignorant … they will sink under their own weight without the aid of foreign invaders … Samuel Adams in a letter to James Warren, 4 November, 1775
~ joanie