…is the day our country dies:
Here is a sociological experiment that might have something to teach us:
Kick down100 doors of self-proclaimed French pacifists, grab the women and kids, and haul them away. Then try again in Texas, with 100 NRA members. Collate, or rather, have a surviving relative collate the results. Extrapolate the abductors’ rates of casualties to determine the total number of murdering swine needed. See what percentage of jackbooted thugs have a suicide wish and then determine the number of men you will need to disarm, kidnap and murder 50 million armed people.
You will need a lot of men. More than you can raise.
These trust the people freedoms are so deeply engrained in the fabric of America as to be almost hereditary, I think. I used to worry that we’d bred that out of us, and then along comes Todd Beamer and company on United Flight 93, who, first among us that day, realized they were being marched to their deaths and decided to do something about it. Not for themselves, because by taking that action they knew they were doomed. They did it for us. Not only to save the lives of those on the ground for whom their aircraft was headed, but to remind us of who we are as a people, to add to the list of ordinary Americans who can gather extraordinary courage and resolve because they have been trusted all their lives by their government and their fellow citizens.
He mentions another point worth accenting:
As PJ O’Rourke points out, the U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate people safe, prosperous and free. Smarter people than me may disagree with that document – I’m for not touching a comma.
So as a proud son of those brave men, I’ll take freedom – all of it – and because I accept the benefits of those freedoms, I’ll solemnly take the responsibilities as well. I may someday lose a child on a trip to Spring Break, but I’ll never lock them in the basement to keep them safe. And I’ll accept the fact that living in Los Angeles puts me at risk for being shot to death because I feel the freedom is worth it. I breathe that freedom every day, and hey, we all gotta go sometime. I’ll continue to fly experimental airplanes because I am careful, meticulous, precise and responsible, and yet the day may come when I am out of altitude, out of airspeed and out of ideas all at the same time. Oh well. I have seen and done things up there that you cannot imagine and I cannot describe. Freedom.
I respect and admire Canada. Although we have chosen certain diverging paths since the days of the Revolution, we have been, and always will be, the best of friends despite our differences. Canada is unquestionably as decent, modest and good a society as exists on Earth today. And yet while Canadians frequently point out that they are free of our vices, I perceive that they are free of our greatness as well. You can’t have it both ways.
Me, personally, I’ll take the spirit, ingenuity and passion that can plant the American flag on the moon over pre-paid health care.
Everything costs something. It is a pain that we have to have troops in Europe, but the peace that those troops in Europe have preserved is not a pain, it is a pain that we have troops in South Korea and Japan, but it is not a pain that both of those countries have been good trading partners and peaceful for decades and have not been to war in 50 plus years.
It’s a pain that we spend billions on carriers and missiles etc, but it’s a blessing that when disaster strikes a world away we can with those carriers provide clean drinking water and relief at the speed of a nuclear powered ship.
It’s a pain that we have to be the worlds policeman, but it also means that instead of a subordinate position were we have to go along, we are in the decisive position where we act and others can deal with us instead.
Anyone knows if you run a business there is a lot of work but you are the man in charge, if you work for someone you have to on occasion take orders and like it. Right now we don’t have to take anything from anyone and because we are what we are, a lot of other places don’t have to either because they know we have their back.
As soon as we stop having their back then the next guy on the block will start running the show, and all those fellows who used to count on us and didn’t mind tweaking us because they had us had better hope the next guy thinks like us, otherwise they are back to the 18th century power struggle, because people haven’t changed in thousands of years, only their technology and the greatest socio/political change for the good for the world in the last 10 centuries came from a bunch of rich white guys wearing powdered wigs who conceived principles that a volunteer force currently upholds for an ungrateful world and a group of pols who think they can count on them forever.
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