Spot on, as usual, betty. Thank you.
My husband and I installed a fifteen-foot flagpole in our front yard in late 1980, the week Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as President. Since then, we have flown Old Glory, day and night (lighted by a spotlight), weather permitting … twenty-five years … five different flags – each replacing the previous one when its colors faded to pink, grey, and pale blue from exposure to the sun and the elements.
We will always be indescribably proud of those incomparable acts of faith, courage, altruism, and decency that used to describe a human character and moral fiber that was somehow uniquely and wonderfully American. Even during some of our ‘darker days’ (as in the ‘90s), there were still many men in leadership positions who stood above the squalor and reminded us of our proud roots and our unique destiny … girding our collective national dignity and providing us hope that ‘this too shall pass.’
Since Ronald Reagan left office sixteen years ago, we have enjoyed sporadic proud moments as a civilization, but the general direction of our national character has been deteriorative. And, over the past few weeks, our national dignity and morality has suffered unprecedented erosion.
We lowered our flag this morning, folded it respectfully, and put it in storage. I am not proud to be an American today … or tomorrow. I am deeply proud of our military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dozens of other areas of the world where their strength is needed and their courage and resolve serve to instill the same in others. But our leadership here at home, with few exceptions, is self-serving, myopic, hypocrisy-plagued, cowardly, prone to grotesque monetary/power-based corruption, irresolute, lacking in vision, ignorant of and/or antagonistic toward those aspects of our history that fostered our former greatness, prone to self-defeating compromise, fiscally and morally irresponsible, oblivious to the need to assure the security of future generations, and an ever-increasing threat to excellence, personal responsibility, and individual life and liberty.
In many ways, our government has become our enemy, and the wonderful, God-centered experiment in self-governance that was once America is fast approaching extinction.
A young American woman died today. One man’s insidious personal desire to achieve her demise … combined with the increasingly illogical, tyrannical nature of what poses as ‘American justice’ … combined with the cowardice and paper-tiger incapacity of our elected representatives … combined with the ‘talk is cheap’ nature of the executive branch … all conspired to seal her tragic fate.
Over the past 140 years, Lincoln’s ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ has found itself incrementally transformed into a government of the career politicians or lifetime-appointed judges, by an elite national leadership with a left-leaning anti-individual liberty agenda, and for the incremental garnering of centralized power for the state. And the people be damned (especially those whose lives, by virtue of their immaturity, disability, or longevity, are deemed expendable).
Now that Terri has succumbed to her man-made, man-ordered, man-condoned demise, those of us who still have the capacity to see the emperor without his clothes are ashamed … heartbroken … grief stricken … outraged. Her husband enjoyed the collaboration of activist judges and indolent legislators. But, if she didn’t comprehend so during her last fifteen years of life, she now knows that there are millions of her countrymen who took her into their hearts and, unlike her husband and her government, those millions prayed that, no matter the outcome of the legal wrangling, she might finally know the peace and glory that had been denied her up until today.
Strangely, any grief that we are feeling is justified, and yet somehow self-centered, in that we are grieving over what Terri’s fate portends for us all. Our self-centered grief is warranted -- even productive -- if it eventually inspires us to take a stand against those who orchestrated and perpetrated the ‘legal/judicial’ abomination we witnessed over the past few weeks.
But we need no longer grieve for Terri. She now knows a perfect peace far beyond our imagining or understanding.
Praise God.
I have been very disturbed by the Schiavo case and just lurking and reading your posts and a few others has helped. Thank you Joanie.
I agree with all of what you said. I am "ashamed" to be an American right now. No one except her family really stood up for Terri. The rest was all (you nailed it) "theatrics."
Why I believe you should unfurl Ol' Glory and display her again.
You and your husband began to fly our flag at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's presidency. A pretty good reason to start I'd say.
But RR was not without deep sorrow over not being able to curb, let alone end, abortion. In meeting with Mother Teresa in 1985 she all but compelled him to end this abominable practice. But as hard as his efforts were RR failed to do so, and 1 1/2 million infants were and are still aborted each year in this country.
But not for a second did RR ever lose faith in the greatness of America and in Americans.
"I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead" --- RR November 5, 1994
Perhaps the most important reason you should run Ol' Glory back is to prevent this scenario from occurring:
One of the neighbor's kids is riding her bicycle by your house and notices that there is no more flag. She's a charming little girl, the goodness of youth abounds in her. She is representative of the next generation we'll pass onto custodianship of America. When she asks, "Joanie, why did you take the flag down?"
Will you tell her what you told us in you post above?
I know I've no business in trying to convince you otherwise, but that wasn't going to stop me from expressing my feelings. :^)