Back around 1934 or 1935, when this ancient veteran was in his early teens, my perennial friend and I would saunter the streets of our neighborhood, chanting the latest in ‘smart-aleck’ sayings: “I’m a peaceful guy and I’ll kill the first person who doesn’t believe me!”
Suddenly, though, it’s seventy-nine years later and in the year two-thousand-and-thirteen, Americans nowhere near our ages are not only chanting those words in earnest but meaning them. Something frightening is happening to this country we all profess to love and it seems as though we’re marching backward, to a place we thought we’d left, headed for a new one that was supposed to be a better one for all of us.
The simple truth is that there are persons in our citizenry who’ve bent our national ethos out of shape to fit a dogma they’ve concocted and it’s not an iota like the doctrine our founders created at the outset. They’ve done so for the very purpose of subverting any possibility, that any national effort to achieve parity for all our citizens is doomed.
There are politicians among us, now, who willfully break the law of license for the practice of medicine, forcing others to undergo painful and dangerous medical procedures, in the guise of preserving life. Not one has been charged or prosecuted for this heinous crime.
There are others who willfully deny American citizens the right to protection against assault by dangerous firearms or the right to cast votes in elective procedures; denials by decrees which have no legal basis and for which, as yet, not a single Court-sought or ordered challenge has been levied. At which point that wonderful old Cowboy philosopher, Will Rogers might have offered this advice: “If you’re looking for the U.S. Senate to solve this problem, don’t hold your breath… about all I can say about the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer, and closes with an investigation.”
As for this worried curmudgeon, he still hopes for a few courageous leaders to get us back on the right track, again.
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