I Used To Have A
Country
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive
Commentary
By Don Feder
04/01/2013
Once upon a time, I had a country. It was called America or
the United States, “Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean,” the land of the free and
home of the brave. The Founding Fathers envisioned it as a Shining City on a
Hill.
For more than two centuries, it blazed across the skies of history. Now, its
light flickers. Soon, it may be no more than a trail of dust and debris.
It was the nation that taught humanity the lessons of republican government,
personal sovereignty and inalienable rights. It was the foe of tyranny which
twice in the last century saved humanity from unspeakable horror.
It was the shores of refuge where my Jewish grandparents and your Irish or
Italian or Hispanic or Asian ancestors came for a life which was impossible
and, indeed, inconceivable, anywhere else.
It was a cornucopia of products and inventions that enriched the masses here
and abroad and made life infinitely easier for millions. It was the factory
from whose assembly line rolled forth the incandescent light bulb, the
telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the television, the refrigerator, the
computer and on and on.
It was a land of strength, determination, optimism, ingenuity and heroism. It was
a nation that led by example, inspired, liberated and defended – that was
unbelievably generous to the destitute and disaster victims around the world.
It was a country that produced giants – leaders touched by the Divine – like
Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Coolidge and Reagan – inventors like Edison, Ford,
Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Goodyear, the Wright brothers and Jobs, and
artists like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cecile B. DeMille.
It was a nation whose optimism was reflected in movies like “The Wizard of Oz,”
“Casablanca,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,”
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “The Ten Commandments.”
It was a nation that was born in blood, endured wars and depressions, slavery
and segregation, bread lines, picket lines and quarantine signs, reversals and
betrayals, gang warfare, urban riots and “peace” rallies.
That was then. Today, what are we?
We may still dominate the world – industrially and militarily – but,
increasingly, we are living off the accumulated capital of the past, drawing
down on our legacy until nothing is left but a wistful memory of our former
glory.
We are a people drowning in an ocean of debt – $16.6 trillion, over a third in
the past four years alone, a nation of indigent sheep blindly following
politicians who lack the will to stop spending money we don’t have (at an
average rate of $3.86 billion a day). We are a car without brakes full of happy
drunks, oblivious to the fact that we are careening toward a cliff.
We are a culture of brokenness. For every 100 children born here, 60 will grow
up in broken families. We are killing the future– 1.1 million of them a year
–in the name of a spurious right to choose. Now, our fertility rate is the
lowest since we began keeping records.
Reagan said, “A nation that can’t control its borders is not a nation.” We lost
our sovereignty at the Rio Grande.
While politicians dress up amnesties as a “pathway to citizenship,” the nation
is infiltrated by parasites, criminals, potential terrorists and the arrogantly
unassimliable – and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Washington,
the courts and media multiculturalists tell us that attempts to stem the flow
are hateful, bigoted and futile.
We’re a nation whose entertainment industry is a cavalcade of degeneracy – a
steady stream of nudity, raw sexuality, bathroom humor, gut-wrenching violence
and sadism. Instead of manufactured products, this toxic trash is now one of
our principal exports.
We are a nation with leaders whose answer to rampaging psychopaths is to disarm
the innocent, leaving them at the mercy of thugs and lunatics, while
congratulating themselves on their courage in standing up to the mythical gun
lobby, as they travel about with armed guards and live in gated communities.
We are a nation of serfs whose laws are written by geriatric ideologues in
black gowns who have made a mockery of democracy and turned the Constitution
into an excuse for tyranny and bizarre social experiments.
We’re a nation which betrays its historic friends while slobbering over its
foes, whose response to the cold-blooded murder of 3,000 Americans was a
decade-long orgy of tolerance and understanding for the death cult that
animated the murderers, dubbed the “religion of peace.”
We’re a country where a plurality now favors “solemnizing” an absurdity and
calling the travesty “marriage” – an unparalleled corruption of language that
is deconstructing an institution on which civilization depends.
We are a republic riding a rising tide of secularism, rapidly turning away from
the God in whose name we were founded.
Our officials hypocritically take an oath of office on the Bible, while they
rarely miss an opportunity to undermine its teachings. We’re a land of the lost
where it’s illegal to display the Ten Commandments on public property or erect
a cross as a memorial to war dead, with a president who deliberately misquotes
the Declaration of Independence, leaving out the crucial affirmation “endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
We are a people so consumed by envy that we habitually fall for the Democrats'
con that society is a zero-sum game, that profits come at our expense and that
Obama and his Congressional gang are all that stand between our precious
programs and Republican budget-warriors determined to preserve “tax cuts for
the rich” at any cost.
We are a country of benefit-addicts who are hooked on handouts. We tell
pollsters that we want Washington to reduce spending rather than raising taxes
– but not at the expense of my program or any program marketed as benefiting
children, the elderly, the disadvantaged, the disabled, or any but tap-dancing,
Anglo-Saxon millionaires.
America 2013 is epitomized by Barack Hussein Obama, a man who so despises this
nation and every thing it stands for that he can’t even bring himself to say
that there’s anything objectively special about the country he leads (American
“exceptionalism”), who showed his contempt for Middle America right at the
start, when he characterized small towns as the haunts of religious zealots,
gun nuts and bigots – a president who’s determined to govern without Congress
and outside the Constitution, who’s committed to expanding government as
rapidly as possible – for whom “revenue-enhancement” is a religion and mega-deficits
are a ritual.
Still, the man who occupies the White House, the way Germany occupied France
during World War II, is a symptom, not the disease. As a conservative
congressman recently remarked: “I think we can survive another four years of
this guy. I’m not sure we can survive another four years of a country that
would reelect this guy.”
It wasn’t the media or the elites that ushered in the Age of Obama. We the
people put him in office and we kept him there.
He’s given us the longest sustained period of 7%-plus unemployment since the
Great Depression, and we reelected him. He’s given us our only trillion-dollar
deficits – one for every year he’s been in office – and we reelected him. Due
to his war on energy, gas prices more than doubled on his watch, and we
reelected him. He nationalized health insurance, resulting in huge increases in
premiums, and we reelected him.
Due to a failure to mount a rescue operation (while he was off playing golf), a
U.S. ambassador and three others died in Benghazi, and we reelected him. His
administration spent weeks denying it was terrorism, and we reelected him. He
called the Ft. Hood massacre (perpetrated by a Muslim militant shouting “Allah
is great!”) “workplace violence,” and we reelected him.
His Justice Department became an enabler of the New Black Panther Party, and we
reelected him. ATF ran guns to Mexican drug lords, and we reelected him. He
told businessmen who somehow managed to make a profit in his economy, that
their success was due to the collective (“You didn’t build that”), and we
reelected him. His family takes lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous vacations at
our expense, while the ranks of the chronically unemployed swell, and we
reelected him.
No wonder zombie movies are so popular.
Those of us who still believe in America are confronted with the appalling
choice of two political parties. One is run by a conglomeration of radicals,
panhandlers and perpetually aggrieved minorities; the other has turned our
values into campaign slogans which it sneers at in non-election years. The
Reptilian National Chairman recently castigated his party’s base for “acting
like Old Testament heretics”(sic.) by taking his party’s platform
seriously.
We are fiscally and spiritually bankrupt. We are rubes at the county fair who
fall for the most absurd nostrums, and gape in awe at the panaceas that are
peddled to us, who care more for “Dancing With The Stars” (while Obama dances
with the Czars) and the latest mini-series than our nation’s survival.
We allow the decent and the honorable – the Boy Scouts, law-abiding gun owners,
churchgoing Americans, entrepreneurs – to be vilified. We arm our enemies ($1.5
billion in military aid to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood), undercut our allies
(dictating extinction borders to Israel), surrender our sovereignty and sell
our inheritance for a bowl of government pottage.
What can be done? First, accept the reality that we will probably lose – that
those of us over 40 may well be the last generation of real Americans.
But in that acceptance, there is power and, perhaps, hope. In “Band of
Brothers,” a captain advises a private who admits his fear: “The only hope you
have is to accept the fact at that you’re dead and the sooner you accept that,
the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier’s supposed to function.”
America may yet beat the odds, though the prospects grow dim. If not, what
better than to die for than the country that once was? While there are still
words to write and speak, ballots to cast, flags to wave, cases to argue and
noble gestures to make, duty requires us to stand fast.
