Posted on 11/02/2008 6:14:24 AM PST by waRNmother.armyboots
Last Sunday, I cried for America. I didn’t cry for the money we’ve lost in our current economic turmoil or because of predictions Obama will win the election or out of concern that America is losing status in the world. No, any one of these events was not the cause of my tears, rather they are symptoms. My tears were tears of grief, tears of guilt, and tears of fear, for the very idea of America as envisioned by our Founders, appears to be very ill these days.
As I watch the financial crisis unfold and reflect on its causes, and as I watch the news coverage of the campaigns and listen to the polls, I find myself asking, “Have Americans truly grown weary of the responsibility of freedom?” “Responsibility?” you may ask, “Is freedom not a right?” Rights always include responsibilities; they are two sides to one coin. What I fear is that in today’s culture, too many of us have forgotten that the responsibility associated with freedom should be an important part of the conduct of our daily lives. Too often we consider this responsibility only in times of war and military threat. Furthermore, I fear that in today’s crisis, the responsibility seems too much.
Closely considered, you can see that freedom is the foundation of all the unalienable rights sought by the Founders. All they wanted from King George III or anyone else was to be left alone, left alone to live freely in the manner of their choosing, freely choosing how to build their own lives and happiness. In return, they recognized the duty to leave others alone as well; plus, they assumed the responsibility for the choices they made with the situations life brought them. They wanted nothing more than freedom to work, to worship, to think, to try, to fail, and to try again, to go from being poor to being wealthy, and no doubt, they accepted, too, that they were free to go from being wealthy to being poor, if their decision-making led them there. For a century and a half, we built on this heritage of freedom and refined and enhanced it by ending slavery and extending the freedom to live as one wished equally to all.
Such freedom demands that we choose everything wisely and carefully, keeping in mind and accepting the risks and uncertainties of the future alongside the hopes and gratifications of today. Freedom demands our attention at all times. It is impacted by how we work, how we eat, how we vote, how we invest, how we spend, how we do anything. Truly, the dollars we spend and the actions we take are mighty powers, if we use them wisely and responsibly. Personal responsibility is key to maintaining freedom. Has this price of freedom become too much?
Apparently, it has. Polls verify that the people want government to fix the economy, solve their health care problems, save their home loans and incomes, cut their taxes, and more. In America today, the scope of rights to which people feel entitled has expanded radically. Certainly, health care, higher education, home ownership, financial security, and, even wealth were all goals that the Founders would say any citizen should be free to pursue, but the Founders knew that remaining free would mean the responsibility for achieving those goals lay with the individual. We imperil our most precious right, the right to freedom, with these new demands, and the peril stems from the responsibility side of the rights coin. Once these goals become rights to which everyone is entitled, who is responsible for providing them?
Unlike the unalienable rights which demand no positive contribution from others, the ideas and longings listed above would be positive rights. In other words, someone gets a right fulfilled, but someone else must provide for it. The problem with positive rights is they always infringe on the negative rights of someone in some way. How? The unalienable rights leave us to work, dream, build, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts. Our newly sought-after rights take some of these fruits of our neighbor’s labor, thus diminishing his or her freedom to work and enjoy. Such policies clearly, then, infringe on liberty, but even the folks who stand to benefit from such policies lose some of the joy of their basic rights. By eliminating the need to pursue happiness and replacing it with an entitlement, the citizenry is robbed of the satisfaction of personal achievement and accomplishment. Not only do we lose this satisfaction that only we can truly bestow on ourselves, but those who achieve lose the rewards and incentives that have been the impetus for the innovation and entrepreneurship that has brought countless benefits on the world.
When we consider the uncertainty we live with these days, we can see where voters might be motivated to make demands for positive rights. The outlook for our individual and collective financial lives is bleak and miserable. The pundits as much as the populace seem at a loss. It appears that no one knows how to fix this. The need to assign blame to Bush or corporate fat cats or unqualified borrowers is understandable, but as Mama always said, “For every finger of blame you point, there are three pointing back at you.” For quite a while now, plenty of us have seen the signs of trouble brewing, yet we have not spoken out or acted. We have known that Americans, individually and as a nation, have become credit junkies. We have given our politicians a pass, sending not even one concerned letter, about questionable, though well-meaning, policies. Why give loans to unqualified consumers? Why not help them become qualified, instead? We have invested in fast growing stocks to build portfolios as quickly as possible, ignoring the risk and the notion of real value in ways not dissimilar to the speculators whose greed and denial drives them to addictive levels of trading. We have built a house of cards, a fairy tale economy, but now we just want someone to fix it for us.
What I fear is that Americans have reached a precipice, a tipping point as defined by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestseller. Our times and the prognosis for America are confused and uncertain. The Bush administration has already injected the government into private enterprise, a move that, if permanent, is a definite step toward socialization. The current financial crisis, however, is only the latest piece in a jigsaw puzzle that has been taking shape for decades. The idea that we are all entitled to have whatever we want while we do whatever we want to do grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Since then, American culture has been deemed bad for the environment, bad for our image in the world, unfair and mean to anyone middle class and below. The degree of loathing of the American way has intensified steadily and unhealthily, shifting focus away from the vision of what we have been at our best and what we can be when we fulfill our legacy. This message has permeated popular culture, promoted by college professors, the news media, the movie industry, and liberal politicians. Americans have been sold the idea that we have to change. And, change is likely to be the order of the day on November 4. The idea of change has never stuck or been as enticing as now. Obama’s Main St. versus Wall Street rhetoric and the idea of electing the first Black American to the Presidency, an act that should serve to heal some very old wounds, have Americans sold on the idea of change.
But I won’t be voting for Barack Obama, though I have seriously entertained the idea throughout much of the last year and a half. You see, when I first started listening to Obama’s message, I was hopeful that he held the same appreciation of the Founders’ vision of freedom and responsibility as I do, but the revelation of his policies tells me that he favors positive rights and the idea of absolute equality much more than he values freedom. Maybe he truly believes that government can create both, but history teaches us otherwise. We can never make or keep everyone’s status equal. The classless society is never really classless, and, in the end, the citizenry forfeits its freedom for nothing.
I wonder how far left the country would move under an Obama Presidency. Several conditions make a substantial shift not only quite possible, but very probable. First, he would have no check placed on him by Congress since the Congressional majority favors positive rights and follows two leaders whose modern liberalism matches Obama’s. Additionally, this group of legislators has called to overtly impede freedom of speech and of the press with the Fairness Doctrine and has worked to curtail Second Amendment rights to bear arms.
Next, the press, except for Fox, will not place any checks on Obama. The press is supposedly our “fourth estate,” meant to serve the interest of the people. Rather than serve, the press works to lead the people, especially in matters of politics and social change. If you doubt the media bias in this campaign, just look at the contributions that the Obama campaign has received from media sources. The parent companies of CNN, NBC, and CBS have all made sizable contributions to the Obama campaign and none to McCain. In fact, several recent comments from the Obama camp and the lack of news coverage about them have given me serious pause. The most troublesome came from Joe Biden at the Seattle fundraiser where he said Obama would be tested. The media played the comment about Obama’s mettle to the hilt. What few people know is that Biden went on to talk about how the decisions that he and Obama would have to make would most likely be unpopular and questionable. He was asking the supporters to keep the faith and fervor they have had during the campaign in the future. Obama, according to Biden’s comments, would need their support, with “the use” of their “influence in the community.” I worry about a ticket that asks for such blind faith without any explanation.
Furthermore, consider the array of Hollywood stars who support Obama. Frankly, none of them share my hopes for America. They subscribe to the negative view of our country, all while many of them reap the rewards of its liberty, making as much money or more as the corporate CEOs they demonize, and growing just as wealthy as the fat cats of Wall Street. What is particularly perplexing is that none of them seems to worry about Obama spreading their wealth around. Perhaps they will benefit from their close association to the candidate.
The collision of this election and the current economic crisis make me very fearful that Americans will opt for being taken care of because they will think their futures are more certain. But, we should always be careful what we ask for; we might just get it. Look at what our demands from government have done for us already. Even when spending for the war is factored out, Americans make more demands from the government than we are paying for. That is why our government has a budget deficit and owes money to others around the world. Indeed, some steps to prevent an outright depression were essential because global economic disaster will most surely set the stage for global conflict. For the government to solve the crisis single-handedly, though, without increasing our debt to other countries or driving up inflation will be nearly impossible. The value of the dollar has suffered drastically which adds to my worries, because a traumatized currency threatens the whole system. Vladmir Lenin recognized this, saying, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” This fiscal instability and demands for more and more positive rights via socialized programs puts us at a precipice. America seems too closely leaning toward the brink to socialism. Will Barack Obama push us over? I do not know, but the evidence suggests that the conditions for such a plunge are much more likely with Obama than with John McCain. In these unsure times, I will err on the side of caution. I will vote for John McCain, not because he has a perfect record, but because I feel much more certain that his appreciation of rights and mine are the same.
Borrowing from Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, I find myself wondering, “Are equality and certainty so dear, or ease so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of freedom?” Any teenager longing to be on his or her own recognizes that they will never have full freedom as long as their parents support them. When people invest in you, they own part of you. Any 17-year-old can tell you that. Kids know you can have someone take care of or you can have your freedom, but you really can’t have both.
Over the last week, I’ve ventured to share these points with others, dared to vocalize my worries even with folks I knew would disagree with me. I am heartened to find that I am not alone with these concerns. There are others also focused on the health of American freedom. Still, I fear how close we are to the edge, to the fall of American freedom as envisioned by our Founders, fought for by our fathers and grandfathers, nurtured by our mothers and grandmothers. I still carry a guilty fear that I will face them someday and have them say that I, that we, did not do enough to save the best dream humankind has ever birthed.
Maybe my thoughts won’t count for much. I’m an average middle American school teacher. My husband and I did not grow up with money. In fact, we were both relatively poor, but our homes were rich in care, and we were raised with an ethic of self-responsibility. The possibilities afforded to us by freedom have enriched our lives in every way.
Last week, I cried for America. Today, I am writing for America, pouring my heart out to America, praying for American freedom, asking my fellow Americans to keep Liberty’s torch undampened and burning bright. Our freedom, the very idea of America, is worth the effort.
Do not misunderstand this post. I am not fearful. I posted this because of the foundational truths of our republic this woman expressed.
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