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Gene
Pinkney
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Sweet Land of Liberty
We’ve just survived another busy and noisy Fourth of July, and our little Yorkie, Jake is coming out of his shell and getting back to normal. I went to the town fireworks display and it was more glorious then ever, with amazing new variations and complexities truly astonishing. Still, as has always been the case, and in spite of three amazing crescendos of crackling, thundering, multi floral rocketry, I found myself losing interest. It occurred to me that perhaps that huge and expensive display might have been shortened a bit. Still we must never forget to express our heartfelt thanks to all the great Americans who have fought and died to make our unique “nation under God,” still free after 347 years. But sadly, more and more, I see a growing apathy in America. Very few have even the slightest comprehension of what our freedoms cost us, or why ours is indeed the “sweet land of liberty.” As my generation gradually goes ‘the way of all flesh,’ powerful forces are at work aiming to dismantle our unique republic and open it up to the designs of the radicals --both left and right. Both use the innocuous sounding term, socialism, which many think is harmless, thanks to our civilized neighbors to the north, but on the extreme right, that socialism can become fascism and the Nazism of the kind Hitler manipulated to create his eternal Third Reich with it’s unconscionable holocaust. The extremism of the left can lead to communism, and some of us still remember the atrocities and genocide dictated by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, all responsible for the slaughter of millions. In America the left disguises its socialism with programs geared toward creating dependency: government sponsored programs of all kinds are hyped under euphemistic terms like “affordable care,” or “environmental protection,” or “social welfare.” And all these pie in the sky promises are to be paid for, they say, by “taxing the rich.” Don’t tell anyone, but those rich people end up being the American middle class. The price tag for all of these affordable gimmicks is staggering, The result? Vaulting inflation, making sticker-shock a daily disappointment. Many are becoming inured to it and numbed by it. Countless live from paycheck to paycheck. Socialists on both left and right concur on one thing, neither has much tolerance for that “opiate of the people,” Marx called religion. And my thesis, finally, is this: if they succeed in taking God out of the equation, our “one nation, under God, indivisible, will soon be, one nation, irreparably divided, with liberty and justice for none. So what I’m advocating here is nothing less than an old fashioned revival of the kind that used to bring Americans together. That means a rediscovery of the scriptures upon which this country was founded. Despite the nay saying and mockery of the liberal left, patriotism needs to be cherished, and God needs to be brought back into the picture at every level, especially our schools, the halls of government, and the treatment of addictions. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but if the present headlong plunge toward rule by big government isn’t stopped, the dreams of many fighting to get into this country and escape the poverty and oppression of socialistic regimes like Venezuela’s will turn into the very nightmare from which they are fleeing. Why has it become unthinkable to sing,”I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free?” What was so wrong with living under “the blessings of liberty” in “America the Beautiful,” the land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride in escaping religious persecution? Why should we not all be eager to echo Martin Luther King, “Let freedom ring from every mountain side: Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last!” I’ve had to make this very brief, but for deeper understanding of what is at stake, such as the truths Lincoln saw as “self evident,” that our government needs to remain “of the people, by the people and for the people,” I recommend the several books by David Barton dealing with the beliefs and values of our founding fathers. These can easily be Googled up and purchased very reasonably. Barton, like Bill Buckley before him is a Christian Conservative. Conservatives want to conserve, that is, keep the rights and liberties our forefathers articulated in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Most were devout Christians who believed, that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.” The Spirit of the Lord and the American Spirit need to return to being one and the same.
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