Posted on 02/05/2012 7:32:41 PM PST by lyby
I am a 52-year-old mother of three children - a 24-year old grad student, a 21-year old college senior, and a 13- year-old 7th grader. I am a public school teacher of Math to 7th graders.
I am concerned about the welfare of our country, our Constitution, and the hope (NOT Obama's) for our nation. PLEASE help me to understand what is happening to our country.
I am dismayed by the garbage I am hearing and reading. I have been involved in local politics. I could NOT suffer the bullsh*t, so I resigned from the county Republican Executive Committee, after 5 years and two years on the State Executive Committee. Frankly, I do not come from, nor do I possess, the money that is necessary to serve in these capacities. I had visions, but those visions were naive...
Please help me to understand what it is that I am to do...
If you have nothing positive to offer, then DO NOT REPLY, as I am weary of folks who present a "better than thou" attitude and/or who think I am "a newbie".
I am searching and reaching out...
Sincerely,
lyby
Wonderful post, LRJ.
I’ve been tearful too lately. We are the ones who understand the danger our country is in. Many others don’t get it. They are too busy or too stupid.
But it IS all about GOD, FAMILY and COUNTRY.
I try priorize them in that order. Sometimes I’ve put country first for a period and forgot that the other two are most important and without them, I wouldn’t have the blessed life that I do.
Do you have her book?
What a wonderful thread you started! Thank you!
I’m gaining comfort, myself, from reading the answers to your questions and concerns.
Why does it take money to serve in those capacities; or better asked, how much money does it take to hold those positions?
Are you saying that ability and time to do the job are insufficient qualification? That the primary qualification is financial?
If that's the case, and you lack the money, then your political problem is easily resolved - you aren't qualified. That doesn't mean you can't educate others.
-- Please help me to understand what it is that I am to do... --
Your family has priority. Don't gamble money you can't afford to lose on politics.
Echoing everybody else here pretty much.
Know God. Know yourself. Know your enemy. Fight for God. Fight for yourself. Fight your enemy. Never give up.
Thank you for the well-researched information on the Signers. I am copying it and sending it to my Tea Party friends.
How soft and spoiled we are today!
Brad’s Gramma,
THANK YOU! I have been feeling “alone” and needed some reassurance...
I LOVE this country and what our Founding Fathers intended for us... I pray that my children and grandchildren will live to enjoy the freedoms with which we have been blessed...
My ancestors go back to the Scots and their desire for FREEDOM!!!!
Brad’s Gramma,
THANK YOU! I have been feeling “alone” and needed some reassurance...
I LOVE this country and what our Founding Fathers intended for us... I pray that my children and grandchildren will live to enjoy the freedoms with which we have been blessed...
My ancestors go back to the Scots and their desire for FREEDOM!!!!
Brad’s Gramma,
THANK YOU! I have been feeling “alone” and needed some reassurance...
I LOVE this country and what our Founding Fathers intended for us... I pray that my children and grandchildren will live to enjoy the freedoms with which we have been blessed...
My ancestors go back to the Scots and their desire for FREEDOM!!!!
Encourage your children to have lots of children and to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Children tend to adopt the spirit of their parents - you've done fine.
This thread has political advice that is new to me. Encouraging to learn that "TEA Party" as exposed by the media isn't the end of the line! As for the survival, self-defense, and spiritual advice; well, I just assumed you were already competent.
Naaaaaaaaaa..........you are NEVER alone.
Yours, my Lord is ALWAYS with us, no matter how things appear to be falling apart around us.
And, Free Republic. WHAT a beacon of hope ... there’s a lot of great information on here about preparing for the worst.
If you want to get on a ping list, contact Kartographer...
Realize you’re not alone. There are millions of Americans who share your concerns. We may not be able to fix this country, but we can still fix ourselves and act as godly witnesses to those around us.
This is what is most important:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2010:27&version=NIV
YES! It costs money to be a member of the local Republican Executive Committee. I was willing to “donate” money and, more affordably, my time. However, when the “powers-that-be” decided how much I should “donate” to be a member of the committee, I basically “threw in the towel”.
AMEN!!
What is the fee? How much money, and to whom is it to be paid?
My thoughts are going in two directions at the moment - one, that you might be able to raise the money by "becoming a politician." Your neighbors might contributes, and I am sure that FReepers would. Second, that the demand to "pay to play" might be illegal or against party rules.
Our system is corrupt. Mel Gibson’s character in THE PATRIOT said “A legislature can trample on the rights of men just a good a king can”. That has come to pass.
What to do? All that people are telling you here. I would also add Stay away from liberals. If you work with them, and I know you do, do not argue with them and if they try to bring up politics tell them you’re not interested. You’re not going to change their minds. They are brainwashed. So don’t bring yourself down. Stay on here and communicate to like minded people.
You asked: “What to do?”
Excuse the length, but there are lots of very helpful insights in these items below if you care to follow the links:
Amazon.com:
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [Hardcover] Publication Date: January 31, 2012
Charles Murray, the bestselling author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, this startling long-lens view shows how America is coming apart at the seams that historically have joined our classes.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307453421/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=onecos-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0307453421&adid=0WMHW2Y3JQPHGQWZNXQ3&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fonecosmos.blogspot.com%2F
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WSJ
February 4, 2012, 5:07 PM
Charles Murray Answers Questions on America’s Growing Class Divide
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/02/04/charles-murray-answers-questions-on-americas-growing-class-divide/?KEYWORDS=Demetria+Gallegos
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Friday, February 03, 2012
Government Of, By, and For the Ungovernable
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2012/02/government-of-by-and-for-ungovernable.html
“[O]ur topic.. involves the limits of freedom. Much of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart — which is a must read — revolves around the same subject, which ultimately comes down to the question of how a people can remain free if they reject the virtues — i.e., the intrinsic limits — that undergird the very possibility of freedom.
Murray cites various founders and foreign observers who were acutely aware of this. Indeed, in order to not know it, you must have either attended graduate school or else be among the underclass victims of the toxic ideology of our academic elites.
This is indeed one of the striking conclusions of the book, that our elites, instead of preaching what they practice — i.e., the behaviors and attitudes that resulted in their own success — preach exactly the opposite.
In THE NEW CLASS: PROFITING FROM DECLINE [ http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/02/the-new-class-profiting-from-decline.php ], PowerLine links to a piece at Falkenblog [ http://www.falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/charles-murray-reiterates-willpower.html ] that relieves me of the need to lay the foundation:
“Murray argues the well-off should set a better example by not apologizing for their squareness, but rather, by advocating their lifestyle and scorning those who fail to live up to it — we need more of what is usually called ‘blaming the victim.’”
Nevertheless, the lower classes never stop hearing of “how great it is to be a victim, how noble it is to be poor, powerless, or discriminated [against]; to be wronged is the ultimate in righteousness.” But this is not something our hyper status-conscious elites would ever indulge in themselves:
“Alas, successful people are ashamed to assert they have better genetics, values, and habits — even though they quietly believe it to be true — and so are content to let the media and intellectuals push the delusional idea that success is like when Paris Hilton had sex on a digital camera and built a career out of it: luck, connections, and chutzpah, but no discipline, ingenuity, and perseverence. With such examples it becomes defensible to suggest most of the rich are like that — mere lucky hacks in the game of life. The flip side is that those who are unsuccessful are suffering for no fault of their own” (Falkenstein).
Speaking of Falkenstein’s monster, the whole thing is a weird and twisted academic experiment in reverse-prometheanism: a misguided attempt to make man better by making him worse, or transcendence via regression.
I know many successful liberals who are full of covert (and not so covert) narcissistic superiority, which they deny through assimilation of the liberal sensibility described above. There is nothing empathic or compassionate about them. They live their own lives in a conservative, even blandly bourgeois, manner, and yet, advocate an entirely different set of values for the unsuccessful.
These unsuccessful victims of someone else’s success function only as props in the liberal’s personal psychodrama. They have no interest whatsoever in understanding the actual behaviors that result in poverty or in success. Indeed, they need the poor in order to elevate themselves, which helps explain their dogged adherence to policies that are guaranteed to create more of them.
Murray attempts to distill the cardinal virtues that resulted in America’s unprecedented success — which for him are marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity — and in so doing, show how unique they were to America.
In fact, this is something everyone once knew, both here and abroad. He cites an example from 1825, when a European observer wrote that “no government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States, with a different code of morals.”
Furthermore, our Constitution “can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government” (Francis Grund, emphasis mine).
How extraordinarily prescient! Yes, the ACLU is a strict adherent to the Constitution — the perverse Constitution that results from a complete rejection of the spirit and values that inspired it.
Murray cites various founders, such as Madison: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”
Franklin: “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Patrick Henry: “bad men cannot make good citizens.... No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.”
Tocqueville: “travelers who have visited North America.... all agree in remarking that morals are far more strict there than elsewhere.”
Even Jefferson (not that his erratic thought process should hold any particular weight, except that he seems to be the perennial favorite of the adultolescent left): “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
One could go on and on. The point is, self-government requires first and foremost government of oneself. But with the symbolic ascendence of Obama, we have reached the dangerous tipping point of a government of, by, and for the ungovernable. Or, perhaps of the insufferable over the ungovernable, the former enabling the latter with a poisonous and destructive ideology that is guaranteed to produce more of the victims that justify the ideology.
Again, all of the above goes to the ninth of our Ten Universal Principles, which concerns the limits of freedom.
[ ] [ ]
Ten Universal Principles: A Brief Philosophy of the Life Issues [Paperback]
Robert J. Spitzer (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586174754?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1586174754
[ ] [ ]
I couldn’t possibly express it more clearly than Tocqueville, who is quoted by Murray:
“Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from” doing so. The latter “must be regarded as the first of their political institutions,” for “Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”
But as we have said before, leftism is quintessentially “the possibility of the impossible,” endeavoring always to bring about what can never be, through ideas and principles that should never have been.”
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“Charles Murray’s latest book Coming Apart addresses the same theme, noting that society is splitting up into classes based on their abilities, which are highly driven by bourgeois values. Over the past 50 years, the working class have lost their industriousness, honesty, religion, and respect for marriage, and he presents a bunch of data to bolster this argument (eg, less than 5% of college educated white women have children out of wedlock, but 40% of white women without college do).
This book is a straightforward extension of the main arguments in his two prior best sellers, where in Losing Ground he argued that the Welfare State is destructive to productivity and ethical development, and in The Bell Curve that society is sorting itself into a meritocratic class structure.
By focusing on white people and that portion of individual skill amenable to environment—willpower—he tries to avoid issues of genetics and racial politics that were a large part of The Bell Curve commentary.”
Excerpted from here:
Falkenblog
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower
http://www.falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/charles-murray-reiterates-willpower.html
Thank you, Cboldt, for your comments.
I volunteered my time, paid the required “dues”, and I purchased a “table” at the annual banquet. But when “they” said executive committee members also had to pay an additional amount of money, I balked.
Thank you for the links and the information! Please KNOW that I will pursue this further; however, now I must sleep as I teach those 7th graders Math tomorrow! :-)
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