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Disagreeing only with your assessment of Cruz and TRUMP!!!, I agree with the rest of that post. Rubio has been something of a disappointment and I should not have been disappointed since I knew of his support of and membership in "The Gang of Eight" and worse still, telling one story to Anglo voters and another to Telemundo and Spanish language media. The hour is late. The situation is dire. We can afford no more GOP-E poseurs. We cannot afford Her Royal Thighness or Comrade Bernie either.

While I may cynically express the opinion that America was a nice country while it lasted, I also believe that the American experiment will not be over so long as it lives in the hearts and minds of those dedicated to it.

I moved from urban Connecticut and have lived in the vicinity of Rockford, Illinois for mare than 15 years. Our lives as Americans are harder than they used to be and unnecessarily so but a price is always collected for our errors. My factory working parents could send their only child to good Catholic schools whose academic standards were two years ahead of the gummint skewels although the nuns had no education of their own past high school (with one exception). We diagrammed sentences in our sleep, used SRA reading lessons, and had a rigorous education whether we came from families in housing projects or in the executive class areas. Joe Lieberman's house is in the neighborhood.

When we moved to Rockford, we joined other Catholic parents in creating our own private academy which is now K-12. Latin starts in fifth grade. The high school American history text is The Oxford History of the American People by the late Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard history professor and was written for Harvard undergrads. Morison was also the official historian of the US Navy for World War II and produced FIFTY volumes in that capacity. He died in the 1970s. We supplement his text for years after 1960 or so with FReeper Larry Schweikart's text A Patriot's History of the United States.

Saxon Math. The European history text was authored by recent Yale Dean of Undergraduate Studies Donald Kagan and two associates and is again a college text. Dean Kagan is now retired but he and his associates are willing and available by phone to my wife as to any questions she or her students may have. My wife teaches there. The students also study theology, philosophy, sciences, music, Latin (using old Catholic Jesuit Prep School texts that I studied fifty years ago by Fr. Robert Henle). There is no football team, no junior year abroad in Europe, no unnecessary frills and fancy stuff just a rigorous and well-disciplined and moral education. Tuition is half that at Church run parochial schools which have now come under the influence of that National Education Association types and Common Core. Poor kids who earn their grades are subsidized by contributors who want this sort of education to persist. Someone will have to lead the next generation. We provide one school where those leaders will learn. As the Christophers used to say: If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world it would be!

Individual students get a lot of intensive attention. Some classes are as small as three but most are larger and none too large. Parents hear from teachers verrry regularly as to junior's progress and deficiencies.

It has been observed that Common Core is designed to see to it that today's kids can competently fill out their welfare applications in the future. Rather than waste our time baying at the moon of government and now parochial school Common Core education, these parents will run our own school. We welcome non-Catholic kids so long as they are respectful of Catholicism and the school and well-behaved as is also required of all the Catholic kids. This area has a number of quality Reformed Christian schools as well, Lutheran, and Evangelical Christian. Homeschoolers are also numerous and effective.

That's how, in one respect, we chose to "right the ship" now and in the future. We do it rather than just talk about it. So do many other CONSERVATIVES across the nation as our formerly trusted institutions fail. There are other respects as well: Guns, Babies, Marriage, Political Consciousness and participation, active in our Church, Knights of Columbus, St. Vincent de Paul Society, encouraging personal rather than government charity wherever possible and much more. Getting to know our "neighbors" including blacks and Hispanics and Asians as people, parents and as folks who are allied with us in striving for common goals.

I am too old and my health too compromised (diabetes, coronary artery blockage, kidney failure, to do the sorts of things I did 30 and 40 years ago. I can still, one on one rather than in a classroom, teach and encourage young people to appreciate what my generation learned to appreciate: von Mises and von Hayek and Friedman and Sowell, Cicero and Vergil and Caesar's Gallic War, great literature, actual history by serious historians rather than by shameless "politically correct" poseurs. I can be on the internet from home and engage others in flame wars or engage in conversations always with an eye toward exposing folks here to things that I know that they might find useful. I tend to be as reactive as Trump only with better manners.

We wanted more for our kids and we got more for them a whole lot more. We did not ask the local public edumakashun system for anything. We bought one of their obsolete buildings. Education is determined by teachers and students and texts and not by fancy digs and "That's Entertainment!" posing as education.

Satan Never Sleeps was a movie about the fall of China. The title rings true. When people are ready for it, they should also study the two books by Saul Alinsky Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, one or both dedicated by Alinsky to "Lucifer the original revolutionary." Alinsky was an evil genius, personally mentoring Her Royal Thighness and, second hand, influencing Obozo. To defeat your enemy, you must KNOW your enemy. We have been brutalized by masters of the art.

Finally, there was a United States Senator from Idaho, Steve Symms, who defeated Frank Church in 1980 and served two terms. He was apparently an apple farmer when he ran for and was elected to a seat in the House. He had commercials in that first race that urged constituents to remember that there are three boxes to which aggrieved Americans may resort. First is the ballot box. Then comes the jury box and then comes the ammunition box. Take a Bite out of Government (Symms biting an apple) and Elect Steve Symms. They did.

No sensible person wants to unnecessarily rely on the ammunition box or even the jury box. We are conservatives. We are not Robespierre or Madame Le Farge. We ought to attempt to dispose of the Louis XVIs and the Marie Antoinettes without the guillotine lest we wind up with Bonaparte aj Talleyrand instead.