America is Getting Back to Normal and That’s Sad and Scary

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/1/21

            The American experience, if dated from 1776, will be 245 years old in July of 2021. Two and a half centuries are not a long time. Compared to most nations of the world, our nation is still a babe in arms.

            Ours was a genuine revolution. Unlike the failed French Revolution or the Communist Revolution of Russia that simply swapped one set of tyrants for another, the American Revolution centered on ideas and principles that the Old World, including merry old England, knew little to nothing about. Those ideas included, above all, individual liberty and representative democracy. No more kings, queens, dukes, potentates, or ruling families. Americans would choose their leaders. They would live under written law, not spoken edicts. That written law would allow farmers, frontiersmen, small businessmen, surveyors, ministers, and every other stripe of commoner to serve in legislative halls.

            These political ideas and principles of the early Americans were not totally new. The Greeks, actually the first westerners, lit the first glimmers of democracy. The amount of freedom that Englanders enjoyed was dependent upon whichever ruling family was in power. What happened in Philadelphia in 1776 was primarily under the leadership of self-dependent, freedom-loving men, not royalty.  

            The short history of self-government is immensely important. Its pinnacle and its best illustration is still the radical, revolutionary action of America’s founders. What they birthed and cradled was not normal. What their parents had fled was normal. Historically self-rule has not been the norm, but the exception. Oppressive government and tyranny have been the norm.

            Yet, America’s current prevailing culture objects to saying that America is an exceptional place. Barack Obama explicitly stated, “I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism.” Those are weasel words and they reflect the view held by leaders in politics, education, entertainment, sports, and corporate America. To them the claim of exceptionalism is xenophobic. Their favorite song is not “America the Beautiful,” but “We are the World.”

            Unlike Henry Ford, the Vanderbilts, and others, today’s corporatists are trans-nationalists. America is just one of many nations with whom they do business. Corporate CEO’s shame us for being “racists” while doing business with China where freedom and love hardly abound. What hypocrisy!

Today we have a national administration that puts America down and makes it clear that its aim is to return to the normal, the pre-America normal of Big Brother, the governmental tyranny of the Old World. Forget America’s rugged, individualist, frontier spirit. It’s all about the collective Village now, not the villagers, so get with the program.

President Biden and Vice-President Harris will not get off their rant that we are a racist nation, that our racism is systemic, and that they intend to transform/reset all of us, especially our cops whom they’re demonizing because of a few bad apples. Even police chiefs around the nation are shilly-shallying, refusing to defend their cops while caving to the Left’s tiresome script. Watch the next time a chief of police appears before a microphone just after a shooting.

 Forget that slavery was abolished, that Republicans (not Democrats) are chiefly responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Forget that White “racist” Americans elected and re-elected a Black president. Laughably, President Biden calls for unity while showing scorn for cops and evangelical Christians. Call it statism, centralism, or whatever you like, his party is moving the nation from capitalism to socialism. ($200 billion for pre-schooling?) His party is calling for more government power and regulation, higher taxes, and a curtailment of our federal system. In other words Democrats seek to reclaim the normal, that which characterized the world before 1776 and still does in huge corners of the world today. The growth of the state is upon us.   

            So is unchecked violence. Black on Black crime is off the charts and the Biden administration will not address it. Neither will it address the Leftist riots or the fact that cops in large numbers are retiring or resigning daily.

            As for unity, there is no middle ground when it comes to issues like abortion. One side must win and one lose, or we will continue to fight for decades to come. Child sacrifice was practiced in the Old World. Today we sacrifice babies to the god of convenience or “women’s rights.” What’s the difference when dead is dead?

            No, history’s normal has not been pretty. With all her shortcomings, America like no other nation altered that normal. Too bad that liberals want to return to the old ways. The specter of the liberals’ big state looms over us, darker than ever. We had better resist, and fast.

 

Roger Hines

4/28/21