Walking around on Resurrection ground
January 2, 2012 Leave a comment
Gregariously, and without mincing words into politically correct mush, Mark Steyn tells Americans what they will be in store for if our political ship is not course-corrected in 2012. (There are four parts.)
December 10, 2011 Leave a comment
Recently, in my reading of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy: Everything Is Fire, a book included in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series, I came across the term “McDonaldlization”.
This term, coined by sociologist George Ritzer in his 1993 book The McDonalization of Society, defines how Ritzer sees the dehumanizing affects on society through the use of a fast-food restaurant’s operation methodology in many of our businesses and our institutions. He tells us that the scientific methods affecting us are efficiency, calculability, predictability (standardization), control and irrational rationality.
“Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.” (Ritzer 1994:154)
As a process characteristic of doing business, whether as providing a service or a good to someone, McDonaldlization makes sense. But it only makes sense up until the point the customer is served and satisfied by such process. If the customer is not satisfied the process would need to adapt in order to satisfy the customer or the provider would likely lose his customer. Within a free market business scenario both the provider and the receiver have choices and they are free to make them. Certainly it is no secret that many people eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee, receiving the products and service of these companies which embrace process characteristics described above. Others do not seek those products and services. They are free to choose otherwise.
With the Obamacare bureaucratic healthcare franchise coming to a town near you, you the patient will no longer have a choice. Medical providers will no longer have a choice. Both the provider and the patient must now provide and receive respectively what is calculated, predictable, rational and efficient. All of this process will be controlled by the Federal Government. You are being told a lie that things won’t change regarding your health care under Obamacare. They will change dramatically under this newly created centrally planned institution. You should know that Central Planning Officer (CPO), the health-care computer, will not let you “have it your way.”
In another article in the afore-mentioned book titled Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: The Hidden “Section” in Every Institution the writer describes how man-made institutions tend to become corrupt to maintain and protect its own power under the banner of providing a benefit to others. Institutions “trumpet rationality” (scientific management), “boast stability” (inertia to change or to adaptation for individual needs) and “pronounce power” (we need power to protect you) and yet as we look at our U.S. Congress we see that “Institutions cannot simply be swept clean of their corrupt elements; rather, they tend toward corruption in their very being. The injustice of the institution appears necessary for the maintenance of the institution.” Institutions do not care about democracy. They do not care about your vote.
Institutions tend to serve those in power. When this happens you will be subjugated to the rationality of the institution for the protection of the institution. And, the institution will protect itself. Rationality has nothing to do with how you the patient feels. You will then know the irrational rationality of the institution. Do you understand this?
Now, do you also understand that Obamacare is a loss of choice? Do you understand it is loss of liberty and, more importantly, of human dignity? Do you understand that you will now become codified just like medical diagnoses and services are now codified? Do you understand Obamacare is a loss of privacy? And, of protection?
There are people right now who want all of your medical records on tap so as they say “to make things run more efficiently for the doctor/patient relationship.” We are headed to the McDonaldlization of health care via the institution of Obamacare. Wait till the Obamacare franchise hits town. You will be Big Mac’d in thirty seconds or less.
December 4, 2011 2 Comments
“I simply can’t imagine a society that is radically secular or anti-religious that is nonetheless able to sustain liberty and human dignity in any meaningful way,” says Daniel J. Mahoney, author of The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy against Its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends.
“Precisely because Gingrich is right about the moral crisis the country is facing — millions of lives and entire communities destroyed by drugs, alcohol, gangs, and violence — there is a moral imperative for him to fill the leadership vacuum and address the growing devastation.” Arianna Huffington, Why Newt Must Run, The Weekly Standard, 1995 (h/t Legal Insurrection)
The video below provides a great opportunity to become familiar with Newt Gingrich. I suggest watching the complete video. Of special interest to me is the segment starting at 27:51 regarding his moral character, his family background, his promotion of wisdom, his Christianity and his discovery of the power of the Eucharist.
November 24, 2011 Leave a comment
Words you will never see on a OWS or union protest placard: “THANK YOU”.
At the table this Thanksgiving there will be those who give thanks. There will also be those who pull up to the table demanding more. This latter group will echo Obama’s class warfare rhetoric griping about inequities and fairness.
There are those who do not give thanks. They will be waiting for their demands to be met. They will beg for “this, that or the other thing”, bemoaning their own situation as being intolerable. For them there is never a thought of thanksgiving even when their most dire needs have been met. I am reminded of the historical account of Jesus healing the Ten Lepers:
“As he (Jesus) was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.
One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.
Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” (emphasis mine)
As this account reveals people will gladly seek benevolence from others but they will often do so out of the understanding that they deserve such gifts or benefits. This is especially true if government has become the benefactor. And because our government has deep pockets full of other people’s money these same people may certainly feel that they have “right” to demand things from the government bureaucrats who have set themselves up as demi-gods of benevolence. These people believe that they “justly” deserve government beneficence because they feel that they are victims of society and also because the politicians they have put in office promised them “hope and change”; “hope and change” outcomes promised in terms of benefits on the barrel head in exchange for their vote.
Our U.S. Constitution provides for the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The 5th Amendment offers protections to our “life, liberty, or property,” noting we cannot be deprived of any of them without due process of law. Our Constitution does not guarantee the end results under that protection.
In effect, you are promised a fence around the rose garden but not the roses themselves. I learned from my Dutch grandfather that roses require sun, rain, good soil, fertilizing, protection from frost and rabbits and substantial pruning. It takes lots of time and energy, lots of individual attention to create an American Beauty rose. Yet, some people don’t want to work that hard or to be so dedicated. So, they ask the government for the cut roses from someone else’s garden. They do this to make their lives just a little “nicer”, a little “richer”. But, these cut roses quickly whither and dry up and the same people are back asking for more of them.
Dismissing the U.S. Constitution’s accumulated knowledge, wisdom and Judeo-Christian roots as outmoded and not rational for today’s society, social justice advocates demand equal outcomes. They do so by demanding that others be deprived at any cost so that others will receive the benefits they so desire. They do not care about another’s personal property, property such as an accumulated wealth. They care solely about their own accumulated gain. They see inequity not as a summit to climb but as a lot of work and effort that can be easily circumscribed with political action.
These advocates make their demands through willing politicians like Obama, Reid , Pelosi, Barney Frank (MA), Dick Durbin (IL), etc. These politicians campaign with promises of changing the social landscape to favor their own version of utopian socialism. They usurp the black and white meaning of our U.S. Constitution by “intuitively” reading it so as to give the government the power to mandate social change via taxation, via the commerce clause and via the politician’s own self-interest of encapsulating power via re-election.
Speaking of self-interest, capitalism is a person who out of self-interest seeks to barter or sell a good or a service to another. The ‘other’, thinking he will benefit from the exchange, makes the trade-off. The exchange is made and both parties are happy, satisfying each their own self-interest.
Utopian socialism is a one-way exchange. It is taking from Peter to pay Paul. It is depriving Peter of what he has earned, grown, protected with his life, it is taking his savings and his wealth and then giving it to Paul for no other reason that Paul may need or want the same things. This is what is now being called “social justice” but it is not justice. It does not give Peter what is due him – the right to his property. It does not give Paul what is due him – the right to pursue happiness. This exchange is more accurately described as highway robbery.
These social justice advocates presume that the U.S. Constitution meant for them to have equal outcomes or perhaps even that the Constitution is outdated, archaic and without justice as they see it. The social justice protestors cry out “Have pity on us, government, give us what we think we need and what we so badly want. You have the means. We gave you the place of authority.”
In 1993, during a lecture titled “The Meaning of “Justice””, Russell Kirk of the Heritage Foundation said:
“In this disordered age, when it seems as if the fountains of the great deep had been broken up, our urgent need is to restore a general understanding of the classical and Christian teaching about justice. Without just men and women, egoism and appetite bring down civilization. Without strong administration of justice by the state, we all become so many Cains, every man’s hand against every other man’s. The humanitarian fancies himself zealous for the life impulse; in reality, he would surrender us to the death impulse. The humanitarian’s visions issue from between the delusory gates of ivory; justice issues from between the gates of horn.”
Today’s OWS protestors plead for pity from others using lawlessness. They are being urged on to political violence by men who should know better. They also do not seek God for their daily bread. That would require humility on their part.
Just as ten lepers were healed and only one returned to give thanks, nine out of ten of us may likely think that we deserve such a “gift” and just walk away, pleased with ourselves having pled for pity and receiving something in return for our “effort”. The exclusion of “Thank You” from the placards of men’s lives reveals the lifting up of “MY Rights” and the idolatrous nature behind most dissent and protest. The idea of justice, “to each his own”, is being replaced with “feed me and then ask of me virtue.”
The Greatest Disparity in our society is between those who with contentment give thanks to God and their neighbor and those who, like leeches, demand ever more and more from government and their neighbor.
It is time to Occupy Thanksgiving without asking for anything in return. And, let us give God what is due Him:
“Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.” Psalm 107:1
November 19, 2011 Leave a comment
Thomas Sowell, in his excellent book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, discusses the two main opposing ways of viewing the political, economic and social landscape. These views have come down through time to the present dichotomy of visions, namely the Left or Liberal (modern sense) vision and the Right or Conservative vision. Sowell denotes the two visions: one being the unconstrained vision, the former, and the constrained vision, the latter.
I will try to make this a short post. Here is my brief take on The Unconstrained Vision:
The unconstrained vision relies heavily on surrogate decision makers, men or women of “superior” intelligence and virtue, to make our decisions for us. The implication of this vision is that the common man does not know what is good for himself and for those around him. But those with super-rational intelligence and sincerity do. And because of our lack of “fair and just” decision making, we the people need an over-arching Decider – someone to rein in society.
I recently read what I would call a perfect description of this viewpoint’s totalitarian heavy-handedness, an oppressiveness which is often disguised as omniscient benevolence which hides its use of debilitating control methods:
“…Nurse Ratched is the Decider; under her unblinking gaze, the privileges, rewards, punishments, dosages, and furloughs for the patients are parceled out or denied. Time itself seems to run at whatever speed Nurse Ratched decrees, the clock slowing down to bring everything to a snow-globe standstill to conjure a sense of suspended animation, a zombie twilight. Sparks of resistance are ruthlessly snuffed. Waiting in the wings is the Shock Shop, where you go in as a person and are wheeled out as a vegetable after sufficient voltage to the brain…” (source listed below)
If you haven’t noticed by now, we are living in the “zombie twilight” of the Obama Presidency. Obama is our country’s Nurse Ratched. He is a prime example of the unconstrained vision’s all-powerful omniscient Decider. He is someone who talks down to people. And enabled by the main stream media He has become the Chosen One, the chosen articulator of reason and we are his hapless patients waiting for him to put us in our place. Obama certainly believes that we the American people should follow his lead down the road to social justice and fairness. He believes that he knows what is best for us because he also believes that we the people are inept, confused and inferior in intelligence, unenlightened, lazy and worst of all, free to think for ourselves.
It certainly appears from Obama’s messages to the American people that his vision, historically filtered by the teachings of the radical Bill Ayers and “God damn America” Jeremiah Wright, has given him the understanding that he has seen the light while we the people walk in pre-enlightenment medieval darkness. It is with unbridled hubris that he stands above society, a mullah standing in an ivory tower minaret, lecturing us and calling us to pray to the god of one-world socialism and to the jihad of class warfare.
Those with this unconstrained vision see institutions as being at fault for man’s condition and not man himself. They believe that man is a victim of inept policies and inadequately funded schools, food programs, housing programs, bailouts, etc. And the free market, where Capitalism operates, is the impersonal culprit who steals fairness away from the victimized society. The unconstrained vision seeks to reign in the free market in order to control the outcomes of supply and demand using price controls, wage controls, unions, rent controls, quotas, the Dodd-Frank Act, ad infinitum.
Controlling the market place and controlling outcomes are what those with the unconstrained vision use to promote social justice and fairness. They want the results of economic, political and social activity to be fair in terms of their rationalistic values. Yet, they will often, in fact, bypass statistical fact to promote fairness and equality. In so doing they will often create a domino effect of economic havoc and inequality. This type of Stage One thinking is common for those with the unconstrained vision. They want “fairness” implemented now at any cost regardless of the many negative repercussions that will be sure to ensue (e.g., Obamacare).
For the Left life is a zero sum game. If someone gains then someone else must be losing out – there is only so much pie to go around. The Left must “right” this perceived wrong.
The legal system is another thing to be controlled by those with the unconstrained vision. Instead of black and white laws known to everyone they seek to implement ad hoc reasoning per every legal situation. Take for example a man who steals and is arrested. He knows that he will be punished for his crime. The law clearly states the crime and lists the options for punishment that the judge may impose. The criminal knows that everyone will be treated the same way in the same situation within the letter of the law. Even though the criminal does not like the situation he still knows that the law applies to everyone and therefore deemed fair by everyone. In fact, he stole knowing the law and the consequences of his actions.
An activist judge with an unconstrained view, on the other hand, will have the same law before him but he will use his own ad hoc articulated reasoning to determine whether the man should be punished. This judge may decide that the criminal acted badly because of his poor living conditions or because he was having a bad hair day or…and then decide to let him go. The judge would consider this a just outcome. The victim would not, of course, consider this fair.
While the unconstrained vision is all about controlling the political, economic or social landscape for specific outcomes the constrained vision is hands off or laissez-faire in its dealings, seeing man as having sufficient accumulated knowledge and being capable of making prudent trade-offs that would benefit himself and society in the process. Nothing is done in isolation. Benefits abound because for the Right life is not a zero sum game. Everyone can win. Everyone can have their own pie.
The constrained vision sees man as he really is: self-motivated. This realistic vision sees man as selfish and greedy but also willing to respect tradition and rules and certainly able to make prudent trade-offs based on knowledge gained from centuries of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, knowledge and wisdom not confined to an omnipotent Decider. One with a constrained vision doesn’t have all the answers. He or she must operate with humilty, tolerance and cooperation in order to support the freedom and liberty within which they seek to live.
While there is much more to be said here I promised to keep this short. I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, as a means to understand the vast differences of the two visions behind the political, economic and social struggles affecting our world today.
Quote source: Vanity Fair article, Still Cuckoo After All These Years, by James Wolcott, December 2011 issue.
*****
“The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.” Thomas Aquinas
*****
**An aside into constrained thinking:
November 18, 2011 2 Comments
We are the ninety-nine percent.
We spent our wad and out it went.
We have school debt we thought we might pay.
But now we hope to protest it away.
We are the ninety-nine percent.
We occupy pointless dissent.
We scream and we yell at Wall St. greed,
While anxiously awaiting the next Twitter feed.
We are the ninety-nine percent,
Useful idiots, Mr. President.
Obama, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn
Please provide us with your political porn.
We are the ninety-nine percent.
We want to smoke pot and pay the rent.
We are one percent happy and ninety-nine not,
We don’t “rightly” have what others have bought.
© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved
November 13, 2011 Leave a comment
My pursuit of happiness is being restrained by the Health Care Mandate Law. I now see myself as an indentured slave under the oppressive masters of the Health Care Mandate and the massive debt burden created by our so-called representatives. My children and I are now being shackled to the enormous costs of mandatory health insurance and a gigantic Federal and State tax burden. Government grows at the expense of its people – rich or poor.
Every time activist congressmen and judges stretch the meaning of our very concise U.S. Constitution to fit their unconstrained social agendas it costs the taxpayer money and liberty. Soon neither will be left. It is no wonder the Obama-ites want the rich to pay more – most of the American people and small businesses are tapped out.
For me, happiness is not an expensive health insurance policy written with thousands of pages of small print as a federally mandated law, a law written out of Stage One thinking – without a thought of the damaging repercussions, a law enacted by representatives who hadn’t even read the bill before passing it (Nancy Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill to find out what is in it.“). If you think this is happiness then I also have some insurance that you should buy.
BTW: It’s all OK, isn’t it? Just keep using your democracy to vote away your life, liberty and your pursuit of happiness in exchange for stacks of noble-sounding demogogically derived bureaucratically tyrannical securities. In so doing you are choosing dependence over liberty and therefore, loss of choice.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep…his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C.S. Lewis
November 11, 2011 Leave a comment
A Tale of Two Foot Races
Race Number One:
Eight men enter a race. They are roughly about the same height and weight but come from very different backgrounds. The eight men enter the race knowing that there will only be one winner. It was for this outcome that they had prepared themselves with rigorous discipline during the past four years.
Months prior to the track meet the eight men are told of the rules: A runner must run in qualifying heats. If the runner is successful in those heats the runner will then be allowed to compete in the final race with the other qualifying runners; a runner who jumps the gun twice at the starting line will be disqualified as having a “false start”; the commands “Ready”, “Set” and a gun shot will be used by a track official to start the race fairly; each runner must stay in his lane or he will be disqualified; runners will be timed and the first runner to cross the finish line will be the winner of the race.
The runners all agree and sign off on the rules before the race.
On the day of the race, after running in the heats, the eight qualifying runners come to the starting line. They know that they must run straight ahead in their own lane to reach the one-hundred meter line. They know that if they jump the gun twice they will be disqualified from running. They know that they must sprint as hard as they can to cross the finish line first. They are knowingly competing for first place. The race before them has now become the culmination of years of exhausting training and dedication to finishing the race and receiving first prize.
When the race is announced the runners shed their sweats and come to the starting line. They will then position their legs into the starting blocks and place their hands stretched just hugging the starting line. Seeing the runners in place behind the line the track official then says, “Ready”. Then after a moment he says “Set”. The runners then come up to a set position waiting for the starting pistol to go off. When it does the eight men jolt from their starting blocks and run down the track as fast as their feet will carry them.
At the finish line the winner is the one who breaks the tape. There is also a second, a third and fourth place finisher. The runners-up congratulate the winner for his speed and, implicitly, for his fidelity to the rules and his commitment to the sport of racing.
The first three finishers receive medals, adulation and wreaths of honor from the thousands who have come to watch a fair race between those who have so vigorously prepared themselves. The experience of the race has bolstered each runner’s self-esteem. The cheering crowd is also moved by each runner’s self-sacrifice, dedication and self-discipline. This spectacle has confirmed the crowd’s understanding of playing by the rules and aspiring to excel within those rules. Everyone who witnessed the race that day is stirred to motion – a motion to go home and try harder.
All eight men later return home. They are now more dedicated than ever to prepare for another day of racing and to receiving the crown of victory.
Race Number Two:
Eight men enter a race. They are roughly about the same height, weight but come from very different backgrounds. The eight men entered the race knowing that everyone will be a winner. It was for this outcome that they saw no need to prepare themselves with rigorous discipline during the past four years. They just had to show up.
Months prior to the race the eight men are told the rules. They are told the rules are subject to change at the time of the race based on the current ad hoc articulated reasoning of one superior intellectual with unquestionable virtue. A runner must run in qualifying heats but this will not be a constraint. Whether or not a runner is successful in those heats he will also be allowed to compete in the final race with other qualifying runners; a runner who jumps the gun twice at the starting line will not be disqualified from running. Instead he will be given another chance; the commands “Ready” and “Set” and a gun shot will be used by a track official to start the race fairly, though any sincere attempt to cooperate with the official will be accepted; each runner must stay in his lane or he will be disqualified unless, of course, their background is such that they have never stayed within the lines; runners will not be timed because such keeping of minutes would be discrimination against slower runners. The first runner to cross the finish line will wait at the finish line so that everyone will be considered a winner of the race. This must be done at any personal cost to the first one crossing the finish line.
The runners agree and sign off on the rules before the race.
On the day of the race all of the runners come to the starting line. They know that they should sincerely try running down to the finish line. There will be prizes and the appreciation of well-wishers to look forward to. They are knowingly going to try for this reason. This race is now the culmination of years of knowing that the battle is just showing up.
When all the runners are in their starting blocks and their hands are behind the starting line the track official then says, “Ready”. After a long moment of reasoned judgment the official says “Set”. The runners come up to set position. When the race official shoots the starting gun the eight men come out of their starting blocks and run down the track as fast as their preparation has trained them.
At the finish line everyone becomes a finisher, even those who left the race due to being out of breath. There are congratulations all around for having showed up to such an event.
At the awards ceremony all the runners receive medals and kudos from the thousands who have come to watch a race between people who have showed up for a race where the outcome was predetermined to be fair – fair as defined by a few judges of superior intellect and of unquestioned virtue.
Later, all the runners returned home and rested from another day of showing up.
*****
A Tale of Two Foot Races: Equal Opportunities vs. Equal Outcomes by Sally Paradise © Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved
Cindy Wity 
European Vacation Part III
January 7, 2012 Leave a comment
I have an answer for those who would like to see America become like Europe: take a slow boat to Europe.
If you are young and hold a useless degree (liberal arts, gender studies, “identity” studies, African-American studies, etc) and are jobless in spite of Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 than take your worthless piece of paper and flee to the cafes of Paris or Rome. Spend your Recovery summers and winters, springs and autumns in Europe. Become one of Europe’s intellectual elites. Better yet, become the vagabond that you have always dreamed of becoming– just you, nature and Kumbaya. Become the insipid whiner who decries American liberty for having too much opportunity and too much choice and not enough government programs making choices for you.
If you are seeking European style health care then the perfect answer for you would be to relocate yourself and your citizenship to a European country. After all, America, having paid for the defense of Europe during WWII to the tune of 80 plus billion dollars and with thousands of American lives, allowed European nations to turn their swords into plowshares, their guns into socialized medicine. America effectively paid for the implementation of Germany’s health care system. And, doesn’t America still have a military base in Germany protecting German interests as well as American interests, freeing up German defense dollars for healthcare?
Coming out of a decisive victory made possible by America, the Marshall plan funneled huge amounts of money into the rebuilding of European nations devastated by the Third Reich. America paid a steep price to free Europe from her enemies. Europe responded by turning inward and to pampering herself with socialized health care. The facts now reveal, though, that under European style socialized health care you will get a small bang for your Euro in Europe, unless of course you are really looking for legalized drugs.
And, if you are looking for top-down centralized government and the chance to really all-out criticize and complain about America then Europe is the place for you. Over there, in the Elysian Fields where there is “blessed” life after life in your despised America, you can rail against the Yanks for being so greedy, so selfish, so uncaring, so hard-working and so American. Forget about WWII. Forget about the fact that America is the most charitable nation on earth (a common good interventionism) and a strong defender of liberty against totalitarianism. And forget, too, that millions of people left their homelands for the chance at American prosperity and for the freedoms of speech, religion and choice.
In Europe, give in to your to your passions and to your righteous anger. Go riot in the French streets about banal differences in French cinema. Find your mojo among the militant Left Euro-Sophists. Stir your Café Americano pensively, smoke your Marlboros and sit around in distressed blue jeans chatting smugly with others of your herd about your almost extinct planet and the need to create a global warming franchise like Al Gore has done. You have earned it.
A vagabond status of passive living is so incredibly ‘60s. Peace and love baby. Go for it. Experience the experience. Become one with the world. Find yourself. COEXIST with yourself in Europe and please leave America to the Americans.
If you are looking for “Hope” and “Change” look no farther: America’s promise of liberty, opportunity and choice is filled with “Hope”. To be sure, American hope is born out of character which is born out of perseverance through trial, through hard work and yes, through suffering and not out of European-like nanny state programs which enable sloth, intemperance, envy and even despair.
“Change” comes when you begin to fully appropriate America’s “Hope.” “Change,” thus, begins and ends with you, right here, right now. Or, board the next boat to parts unknown.
[1] David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On Dismantling of American Culture (New York: Penguin Books: Sentinel, 2011, http://davidmamet.com/) 44.
[2] Ibid, 64
Rate this:
Filed under essay, Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, Writing Tagged with central government, Europeanization of America, politics, Reinvestment and recovery act of 2009, socialized medicine