I am 50 years old, more or less, and For about 40 years of my life, this country was more or less what they taught me it was supposed to be, pretty much a the founding fathers set out to make when they created the Constitution.
But in the past 10 or 12 years, the post 9-11 world has changed this country greatly. Bush (W) and his like gave us the Patriot act, which led to the ever more voracious NSA, the DHS, and an ever greater surveillance state.
Along come Barry O and the effective abandonment of the rule of law, the limits on the Executive.....and the failure of both the Judicial Branch and the Legislative to limit him.
I fear the country that I grew up in is gone....that the country I was taught about has ceased to exist......that the Constitution, that document that specifies a set of rules which made this country the destination of so many freedom loving people and protected the freedoms of it's citizens...is gone forever.
There has always been some small erosion, but it never seemed to amount to much...the country was strong, the freedoms like bedrock, the laws sacrosanct. No more. The erosion has undermined our freedoms and the rules that protect it. And our legislators and the courts are refusing to help keep that rule of law alive....
I fear we shall have nothing soon. That there will be a collapse in the not too distant future, leaving us a smoldering heap of liberalism like England, or, to a lesser extent, Australia or France. A weak country, that cannot support itself and cannot last.
Sad, isn't it.
ReplyDeleteSad but true... the downhill slide is becoming a runaway avalanche...
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to say when the end began. Where will history say that we as a nation went astray?
ReplyDeleteWas it the PATRIOT act? Was it when the ATF began gunning down people in the 90s for not paying taxes on machine guns?
Was when we went off the gold standard and began printing fiat money? Was the "new deal" the first step? The communist witch hunts of the 60s?
All I know is that I was a boy scout in the 70s and early 80s. My scoutmaster was from Russia, and he told us the story of how his grandmother smuggled him out of Russia in the truck of an automobile in the 1960's.
He used to tell us how in Russia, people would simply disappear if they spoke against even a minor government functionary. He told us stories about having to bring your mail into the post office unopened, so the postal workers could read it before it was mailed.
I used to smugly think how much better we were than the Soviets, because we are so free. Now I see so many of the stories he told us about the Soviets happening here, and I realize that this is not the nation I knew as a boy.