Tag Archives: America

God bless America…

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It’s Saturday… and here in Ceciltucky, Saturday means the weekly grocery run to Walmart. Now Walmart being what it is, I rarely leave with only groceries. Today’s plan was to pick up a few backs of the D-cell batteries that there are never enough of at the store before a hurricane and check prices on a variety of ammunition over in the gun aisle. Let the record show, that I was at least successful at scavenging sufficient batteries for the next power outage.

Ammunition was a different story. Aside from a few boxes of assorted 12 and 20 gauge shells and even fewer boxes of .30-06, Walmart’s cupbord was looking pretty bare. I guess at least a few of the people around here have been paying attention. Usually I’d be annoyed that what I had wanted wasn’t in stock. Instead, I looked over at the guy running the gun counter, nodded hello, and simply said “God bless America.”

A message on your birthday…

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Today is the 236th anniversary of American independence. It would be exceedingly easy to wrap this post up in the flag and let it be. I’ve done that often enough in the past. Like most other birthdays, we don’t spend much time on the 4th looking at the things we collectively got wrong. That’s ok. We don’t go to Great Uncle Leo’s 100th birthday party and remind him about all the times he screwed up. It’s just tacky. But still, there are going to be plenty of blog posts, news articles, and talking heads eager to point out every flaw. There are plenty of other days in the year to do that. I like to think of today as the perfect opportunity to look see beyond the mindless cheerleaders and the cranky detractors and look at our country for what it really is: a work in progress.

Our founders knew times would change and they gave their fledgling republic the flexibility to change with them. We’ve made some really, really bad decisions as a country… and then we’ve changed direction to right those wrongs. We’ll make more bad decisions in the future and in time we’ll correct those too. Part of the joy of America is that we don’t usually stay on the wrong side of history for very long. In 1776, the United States was one of the few examples of a working republic in a world ruled by hereditary monarchs. Almost two and a half centuries later, only a handfull of monarchs are left and most of them exist as heads of state and not heads of government. As a new founded country we went to war against piracy on the high seas rather than paying tribute, we fought brother against brother to decide what kind of country we would be, passed up the opportunity to gather an empire of our own, stood up against laundry list of tyrants bent on world domination, and then more or less built the modern world. At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, America is kind of a big deal.

For good or bad, right or wrong, she’s my country and I’m incredibly thankful for having been born a citizen of this great republic.

Superpower America (or How’s that for Mixed Metaphors)…

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The actual future is going to look different than the future we thought we were going to have. That’s true if only because we’re notoriously bad at predicting the future – We’re all still waiting on our flying cars, right? I don’t think it’s going to be radically different to the point that Canada starts being cool or Hollywood starts making good movies (that would be some kind bizzaro universe). I actually have a sneaking suspicion that the future is going to be painful. Painful in that we’ve spent the last 30 years binging on cheep booze and grease ball cheeseburgers and now we’re about to wake up with a national hangover the likes of which none of us has ever seen. The fight to raise the debt ceiling ain’t nothing compared to the battle that will be joined when we realize we’ve got to actually start paying down the debt itself.

The future is going to seem painful because there’s every possibility that we’re about to experience a world where Superpower America isn’t. Those of us who grew up beyond the shadow of the cold war are going to have the hardest time adjusting because we’ve never had to moderate our expectations about anything really. You guys know I’m not exactly an alarmist, but my read of the situation is that bottom line: Superpower America is too expensive. How we go about fixing that with the least pain possible (the no pain option is well off the table), remains to be seen. So too does whether we have the national will to collectively make hard decisions about what is in the long term national interest and what isn’t; what we can pay for and what we can’t. These decisions matter. Economic realities matters.

Don’t believe me? Ask Superpower USSR how it works out when you pretend economics is an imaginary science. Spending ourselves into oblivion isn’t an option, but I wonder who’s going to be the first to offer up their sacred cows so we can try to avoid slaughtering the whole herd.

Early Voting…

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In one of the great lines that endeared him to the party faithful, Ronald Reagan once told his fellow Republicans “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me.” My feelings about the Republican Party are more or less the same. My Republican Party, the party of Reagan, has been hijacked by fanatics and religious extremists inflexible on a single issue and unable to see a broader policy agenda. The Republican Party left me and for the first time since I registered to vote in 1996, today I voted for a Democrat at the top of the national ticket. I take no joy in it, as I believe John McCain is a good and true servant of the republic, but the thought of a vice president who doesn’t believe in evolution or in letting kids talk about sex in an academic setting and who thinks that living near Russia counts as foreign policy experience is more than I could bear. America deserves better than either of our alternatives this year and in the end I cast my vote for who I believe is the least bad alternative.

What’s the Opposite of “Progress?”

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Congress has an approval rating of 9% and yet somehow something on the order of 95% of individual Members of Congress will be reelected when they run. If there was ever a better case of the people getting the government they deserve, I don’t know what it would be. We have term limits in this country. They’re called elections. If we’re too lazy to throw the bastards out every two, four, or six years, then honest to God, I don’t know what we’re doing here.

Musings on the 4th…

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It’s hard to come up with a new 4th of July blog that doesn’t repeat the same things I have said year after year. I’m not going to go on about the laurels due the giants of the American founding and I’m not going to rail against the useless hippy bastards that want desperately to think the world is a place of sunshine and puppy dogs rather than the dangerous place it is. All I can really say is that today is the Independence Day, the High Holiday for those of us who pray at the altar of republicanism (that’s a small ‘r’ in case you missed it).

Even I’m not arrogant enough to proclaim that the United States infallible in our actions, but I will argue vehemently that we have done the best we could with the world we inherited from the failing empires of Western Europe. In good times and in bad times, I remain unashamed to say before you and before the world that I love my country. For me it has been a land of opportunity that has given far more than I had any right to hope for while demanding so little in return. I know I’m biased, but I don’t shrink from saying that taking all things as a whole, my country is the greatest on earth, not necessarily because of the global reach of our military or our role in global trade, but because of the nearly unlimited opportunities available to this son of a cop and a teacher. I couldn’t possibly ask for more than the chances I’ve been given… and for those yet to come.

Thank you…

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Special thanks and much gratitude to the men and women serving in uniform today, their predecessors who stood watch before them, and countless American heroes who gave the last full measure of devotion for the ideal that a Republic could endure the shoals of history’s stormy seas. You are and have been our protectors. May your long vigil on far off shores bring us peace.

Goddamn hippies…

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While today has been mainly about catching up on class work, I’ll admit to occasionally checking in on the course of the filthy hippy protest in DC this afternoon. Listening to the so-called “leaders” of this movement was quite simply horrifying. The words “we support out troops,” was featured frequently in statements, but it seems that phrase has been picked up as a throw-away line, by those who neither understand nor appreciate the sacrifice the troops are making. That the protest was shown live on cable television, that these people would stand in front of the world, and call for the US to disengage from the war on terror, to retreat back behind the walls of a fortress America that can no longer exists, provides nothing short of aid and comfort to the enemy. Because those who truly do support the troops, those who undeniably know that they only way to win is to destroy the enemy where he lives, remain silent because to speak out is to be labeled a warmonger.

I don’t love war. And in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a need for America to garrison the world. The world isn’t perfect and that’s why we stand a watch while other countries cower in dark corners. Let’s not pretend that we started this conflict. Despite what the protesting mob thinks, we did not ask to be attacked. It wasn’t 90-year old grandmothers who attacked us. It wasn’t even the French whose main mission in life is to be collaborators. Each and every one of you reading this knows who attacked us and you know, even if you won’t admit it in public, why we are where we are in the world today and not in Europe or South America waging this war.

We’re not waging this war on the streets of America, either, but mark my words, if we throw up our hands and declare that defeating terror is too hard to do. If we cut and run. If we abandon this mission, then mark my words: In our lifetime, and sooner rather than later, we will face this enemy here. We will face him at home in our towns and cities. Because we were unwilling to take the fight to the enemy, the enemy will most certainly bring the battle to us.

They be Heroes…

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I don’t quite know why our generation is so down on heroes. Culturally, we use to celebrate those who did great things… Armstrong walking on the moon, Patton racing across Europe, MacArthur wading ashore in his return to the Philippines, Washington as father of his country, Jefferson for the brilliant ideals of the Declaration. These were Americans who were held up to be admired and emulated along with the ideals of strength, personal courage, and duty. Today’s heroes are grown men who are paid millions of dollars to play games we all played as kids (and yes I know baseball players were always “heroes,” but until recently they behaved more or less like respectable members of society) or singers pretending to know how hard it is to “live on the streets.” Better yet is the celebrities who are famous, apparently, for being famous. I’ve never been really in touch with pop culture, but I don’t understand how we are expecting these individuals to fill in a role that had been occupied by the best and the most brilliant American’s of past generations. Good lord, what does it say about us as a nation?

Today, we celebrate Thanksgiving and it’s a holiday not only of celebration for the bounty of our land, but also of the Pilgrim Fathers who helped settle that land. These men and women crossed an ocean in the age of sail. They sacrificed their homes, left their families, and everything they had known in order to possibly carve out a better life in the Wilderness. Somehow we have demonized these heroes as well… We’ve called them ethnocentric (code for racist), we’ve accused them of being the first to breach the line of church and state… Incidentally, they were here before anyone had thought of separating church and state in case you were interested in putting in on a timeline.

Thanksgiving isn’t really a celebration commemorating some old guys hitting a rock. It’s a celebration of a people who gave up their safe (if religiously persecuted) lives to become among the first Americans. As we are all gorging this afternoon, I hope we’ll all take a few seconds and remember what an incredible privilege it is to be American and the opportunities it has afforded every one of us. Celebrate our history and don’t, don’t under any circumstances, let the veil of political correctness close your eyes to the heroes of our common past.