found this on another blog and just had to post it on here
The Basis for a Strong Nation
By R.J. Godlewski
© April 20, 2009, All Rights Reserved
12. The Reawakening
“Be careful what you wish for”. It was a statement that my mother told me thousands of times while I was growing up and I am quite certain that many other mothers had told their children the very same thing. Another one of these priceless – and eternal – statements is the one that goes “If it sounds too good to be true, then it is”. I do not know about you, but I do not need a university debate team or a seasoned diplomat to tell me that the thoughts represent the essence of truth.
Unfortunately, many within our midst today wish for everything and wholeheartedly believe that only that which sounds “good” can indeed be good for us. This flies in the face of common sense. It flies in the face of reality. It flies in the face of history. Yet, we still long for that which we cannot earn and believe in that which we cannot possibly understand. To paraphrase an old saying, we have met failure and it is us.
We do not necessarily treasure the failure that we seek so actively but seek it we do. Through our actions. Through our thoughts. Through our silence. If what it takes to succeed does not sound “good” to our ears, we will gladly abandon it. If what it takes to fail miserably entices us to do what we know within our hearts to be wrong, we will still make the effort with pleasure. We want glory without the burden of sacrifice, heroes without the affront of offense. Our materialistic world simply prepackages everything for our preference of a “one size fits all” lifestyle.
Our nation, our world has become a place where each one of us prefers to be carried aloft upon the shoulders of the many. God forbid should we ever become one of the standard bearers of our great nation as we apparently would much rather become one of its pallbearers instead. To listen is therefore much more convenient than to speak. To be taught less aggravating than to teach. To become “universal” less offensive than to remain American.
Whereas history can blame Nero for the burning of Rome and the Germans for the existence of the Holocaust, our current plight can be blamed upon none other than ourselves. Like those who turned to worship of the Golden Calf following Moses’ delay in returning from Mount Sinai, we have simply abandoned God in favor of whichever entity suits our pleasure at the present. Be it movie star, journalist, professor, or president – as long as they whet our appetite for satisfaction we will quickly turn away from He Who truly provides.
How did we abandon our heritage? How do we continually divert from our proper path? Many have already written on our troubles, but I would like to point a few examples that you may have overlooked. These are not easy to consider, but they have a profound effect upon our future:
Religious Faith versus Religious Fanaticism
The United States of America is built soundly upon the precepts of religious faith, but we are savaged by fanaticism from within the ranks of both the conservative right and the liberal left. Religious faith represents the belief in a God Who orders all and Who bestows upon us certain inalienable rights and responsibilities. The extreme right – religiously speaking – partakes of this fanaticism whenever they, for example, literally interpret the Bible without regard as to the true intent of the authors. God may have inspired its content, but the frailty of the human hand in which He composed His work assures us of ambiguities for the present.
No one within their right mind can conceive of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse literally riding through either downtown Washington or Tehran. No one who truly understands the written Word can locate the so-called Rapture within the text of the Bible. Only the innocently naïve would ascribe 666 (Nero) to any modern villain. Such fanatical beliefs merely serve to discredit true Christianity in the eyes of those already hostile to Christ’s message of Salvation.
The liberal left, for their part, have simply abandoned religious faith altogether and replaced it with an artificial variant akin to Hitler’s perversion of Teutonic Christianity. Their crime of fanaticism rests with their concept of universality – that all people are equal regardless of our actions following our having been created. They worship the Almighty Excuse and blame everyone but themselves for society’s ills. They seek such abominations as gay marriages, abortion, euthanasia, and environmentalism simply to elevate human vice above God’s Grace. Human desire is their deity and it represents a whole pantheon of troubled desires. Their fanatical beliefs merely serve to discredit individual responsibility in the eyes of human justice.
Abandonment of Social Reverence
There used to be a time when men wore suits and ties to attend major league baseball games. Now, the only people who wear hats are idiots like Kid Rock. Our churches used to represent artifacts of history, proud structures adorned with icons and artistry. Today, they tend to look like simple community halls and, far worse, we treat them as such. When eight hundred of my fellow shipmates entered the Pearl Harbor base chapel to listen to a ten-year veteran of a Vietnamese POW camp speak you could hear a pin drop. When I kneel within my local Catholic Church, I cannot even hear myself pray for the noise of those around me. If someone cannot go without using their precious cell phone within church, how, then, can we expect them to dress appropriately?
Once we decided to dress down in our culture, we decided to dumb down as well. During the 1970’s, wearing torn jeans labeled us as social outcasts – poor people too disadvantaged to wear new clothes. Today, it is the wealthy (or those who want to be perceived as wealthy) that spend a fortune on jeans pre-tattered and pre-disheveled. The difference being that it was not our intent to look as though we did not care to dress. We merely saved our best clothes for church. Casual Fridays have forced us into Casual Everyday. Perhaps we need to start the week with Dignified Sundays to shove us into the right direction once again.
Experience Matters
Although I had never voted for the man, the one thing that I truly admired about President Reagan was that he used his experience and wisdom to guide a nation of young and dynamic people. He intimately understood our nation’s valid history of individual effort and technological innovation. Today, we have the inexperienced young leading our equally inexperienced youth. It is a recipe for failure, to say the least.
There is a reason for our natural aging other than to mock us with the decline of our health and bodies. Growing older matures us to the lessons of reality. When we are young, we are energetic and bold. We believe that anything is literally possible but for the thought to succeed. As we grow wiser with age, we learn that our thoughts may not be practical for the rest. We learn that time not only heals all wounds but smooths all failures.
When I was twenty, I was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of Naval hardware (without electricity, no ship could function). When I was thirty, I could not believe how immature I was at twenty – the role as husband had simply shifted my ideals of responsibility from money to family. When I turned forty, I could not believe how immature I was at thirty, for the threat of cancer had shifted my responsibility from future to present. Unfortunately, I do not have to reach fifty to understand how immature I was at forty – the death of a spouse shatters all priorities and refashions our concept of life itself.
Statistically, I can expect to witness another half of my life. Of what could I expect to see within the next forty-five years? By my death, I could be happily married again with seven children and dozens of grandchildren. The second half of my life could be even more extraordinary than the first. One thing is certain; however, I will undoubtedly look back upon these days and marvel at how immature I was.
Our society needs the passion of our youth, but unbridled this energy can do great misdeeds. It is like possessing a college degree without the necessary experience to challenge that knowledge. Great ideas require great effort and time. To merely believe that you know is tantamount to catastrophe. We must know that we know. And that, my friends, is a lifelong learning process.
Evil Exists
Call it what you want folks, but evil – of the true Biblical variety – does exist and it is all around us. It is the only way to explain why students massacre others, why tyrants commit genocide, and why others simply stand and permit these things to happen. Foremost amongst these evils is none other than abortion itself for this abomination consists of three simultaneous sins – 1.) The act of irresponsible sex; 2.) The dehumanization of the innocent; and 3.) The final act of murdering the child.
To simply confront evil with shrugged shoulders makes us no less egregious than those patrons who stepped over a dying woman within a local convenience store. We cannot permit the action of evil through our desire to study it. We are simply incapable of truly understanding the concept of evil, which is why God came down here upon earth to teach us about personal responsibility and strength. Christ conquered evil by dying for us. He did not say that we should sit down and theorize about it – which is why He toyed with our senses through the parables.
Whether we are discussing al-Qaeda, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (and his mullah overlords), or Hugo Chavez, we cannot simply dismiss their evil as matters of opposing thought. Neither have undertaken any action that rational humans would consider as beneficial to the greater population. All are an affront to God for they seek to act in his stead. We do not need to become violent; we just need to acknowledge that their evil cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.
A Bird In The Street Makes More Noise Than Ten In The Bush
Where Evil triumphs over Good is that Evil is far more effective at using people to spread its ill. On April 15th, we saw 350,000 people take to the streets to protest out of control government spending and taxation. This is a good start, but one that was not very effective in the long term. The liberal biased media dismissed the effort as a mere political stunt. What is needed is something a bit more observable to the Left.
If we surrounded the White House or the Capitol Building with only 1,000 people, but kept them there day after day, before long the message would be noticed by even the most recalcitrant media personality. Had the 350,000 Tea Party participants spread out their involvement, we could have kept this 1,000 people in front of our legislators for 350 days. Simply put, we need people to volunteer over the course of time in order to develop a much more permanent opposition towards Congress’s orgasmic spending policies.
Action is needed from much more than a few dedicated individuals. Everyone who upholds our values and traditions needs to participate. If we organize smaller, more long-term demonstrations, then everyone can participate for everyone is able to volunteer according to their schedule. Our message – of a free and strong America – must become as commonplace as the bureaucrats in Washington. We must make them fear our presence, our power, and our beliefs.
We, the American people, are the basis for a strong nation and we need to show that we are not silent citizens being led to the slaughter. Like the Israelites in Egypt, we have God on our side and our voices will be the plague that brings down Pharaoh Obama and his Congressional Phalanxes. We need to split the IRS like the Reed Sea so that we can move into our Promised Land – the America that our founding fathers fought and died for. There can be no greater threat to bureaucracy than a pissed off population. All that we need to do is to take our “mad as hell” message and make certain that those in power take notice. After all, it is our nation that we are fighting for. Sitting on the couch watching others make the effort isn’t going to lower your taxes any.
