Some people believe in the Six Degrees of Separation Theory: the idea that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by six links. Some people believe all of us are in this thing together, and that diversity is our strength and I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
Even if we are all connected in ways we cannot know I believe the world is filled with strangers. Take a ride and as you pass through country, town, and city you are constantly presented with the faces of people you will never know, and all of whom have lives and families that will never know you or your life or your family. Every day we see people we have never seen before and will never see again. They rise out of the mist beyond the pale of our personal knowledge and immediately are submerged again never to rise again. Our only connection will forever be that one fleeting moment when we moved through a single frame of the separate sagas which are our lives.
Unlike Cain I do believe we are our brother’s keeper, and unlike Scrooge I believe we should help our brothers in need instead of seeing them boiled with their own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through their hearts. However, unlike the rhetoric of Marx, Lenin, and President Obama I do not believe that life should operate on the basis of from each according to their ability to each according to their need, or as we say in America today, spreading the wealth around. In other words, I am not a socialist. I believe in personal liberty, individual freedom, and economic opportunity. Sadly I find myself out of phase with the Progressive Clique which has successfully maneuvered its way to power using the education system, the media, and uninformed, uninvolved, and emotional voters.
Out of phase or not, I believe in the equality of opportunity which gives everyone a shot at success as opposed to the equality of outcome which our Leader and his fellow travelers wish to foist upon us, and which gives everyone the assurance of mediocrity. No matter the consequence, no matter the sacrifice we must stand up for what we believe or we will stand by while our nation is transformed into what we won’t be able to believe is still called the United States of America.
Day by day the bean counting pencil pushers who make up the nameless faceless bureaucracy grind out rule after rule and regulation after regulation. President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare, is already churning out thousands upon thousands of pages of federal requirements all meant to fill in the blanks in a 2600 page bill that we had to pass to find out what was in it.
Hope and change has become bait and switch. Mr. Obama isn’t even trying to win votes from those who disagree with him. He isn’t trying to change minds. He is trying to buy votes. He is betting that generations of entitlements have finally birthed the lumpen proletariat that his theories of government proclaim must exist for History to reach its summit. He is betting his second term on the belief that there are now enough people dependent upon the government that they will vote for a handout instead of voting for a hand up. He is betting that America has been dumbed down enough and bribed enough to trade our heritage of freedom for the yoke of a guaranteed something instead of the opportunity for everything.
Class warfare, penalizing success, dividing America into interest groups and voter blocks this is the strategy Mr. Obama thinks will win as he works to build a coalition of leftist intellectuals and those convinced they are disenfranchised. Looking at the polls it appears he has the solid core of 40+% who will vote for a Democrat even if he is the devil himself. The question is will the unengaged and uninformed voters who should at least hope he will change when combined with the illegals and the dead who at least get to vote in Chicago be enough for him to win?
Can you imagine what a second Obama term will look like won on the basis of a promise to double down on social democracy, a complete disregard for the balance of power, and a desire to totally transform America? What will be left of the America we have known? How would we ever get back to where we came from? No entitlement once enacted has ever been repealed. The size of government never shrinks. The power it usurps from the people and the States is never surrendered.
A world filled with strangers keeps getting stranger all the time. No matter how many degrees of separation we should never be as divided as our Dear Leader tries to portray us. We are Americans, and we can do better than this. Reject the siren song of free entitlements which are never free, and embrace the liberty our forefathers won for us. Let us renew the great experiment in human freedom and strive to see our nation rise again to be the last best hope of man that it is meant to be. The shining city on a hill that can light the way to a future worthy of free men and women held together by unity not united in our separation.
Even if it takes more than six degrees of separation to connect to others what does it matter how connected we are to people around the world if we are in terminal disagreement with our fellow Americans? As a nation we are divided between those who want to strive to achieve and those who thrive because they receive. The Progressives have bred generations of passive takers who believe they are entitled to the fruit of others’ labor. They pay no taxes so they don’t care how high taxes go. They have no conception of paying for what you have, so they don’t care about the national debt. They see America as a vending machine, so they don’t believe in our unique place in History. They desire a shabby world of bread and circuses based on equality of outcome, so they don’t long to be all they can be..
Those of us who want America to be what America has been and what it should be, the home of the brave and the land of the free, can’t let divisions divide us anymore! We must unite to save liberty or we will stand alone at the end of the day. We may be strangers to one another. We may not know each other but if we are fellow believers in the personal liberty, individual freedom, and economic opportunity we must unite over what connects us to save what has always made us E PLURIBUS UNUM.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens
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