Topic: America, the Beautiful
Election years are bad for our perspective. We in the blogosphere tend to give people who don't deserve very much thought or attention a lot of it, trying to point out why they shouldn't run the United States of America.
It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the we're so passionate on who runs our country because our country is worth it.
I'm not interested in comparing America with other countries. I'm interested in living here, because I love my country. I love this place because it is where people come from all over the world to be free, and as much as we can, we let them. There are limits to how many people we can let in from overseas, and we always err on the unsafe side, letting more in than we should, because we're not cold-blooded and uncompassionate. We're just not idiots.
I love my country because we are never satisfied with "good enough." America tries hard to be better to our own citizens and to everyone else, every day. We argue with each other constantly about how best to do that, but notice that we do try and we do get better. And there are times when we screw up badly - and we hash it out in the open when that happens.
I love my country because when it would be simpler to just close our borders and leave the rest of the world to its own devices, we go out and try to save the world instead. Sometimes, as Saul Bellow illustrated in his allegorical novel "The Rain King," we blunder into situations where we don't know what's going on or what we're doing - but we're quick studies. We learn fast. (And we're forebearing enough that when a toffee-nosed little snot like Prince Edward presumes to lecture us on how naive and stupid we are in our attempts to wring right out of wrong, we let him into our country anyway, because his Mom's a nice lady.)
One of the proudest moments of my life was when someone in Parliament was bad-mouthing the United States and demanding to know why Tony Blair was so committed to the alliance between our countries.
His answer: "Two people have offered to give their lives up for you - Jesus Christ and the American GI." When the Prime Minister of Great Britain says this to his own countrymen by way of rebuke, we must be doing something right.
In my family's case, it was a particularly touching tribute because my son did give his life in Iraq for his comrades, for the other Coalition soldiers in that area (including some British servicemen), for us in America and for everyone else who would prefer to live in peace and freedom than under the kind of tyranny which the 9/11 hijackers were working to impose on us.
Not a day passes I don't think of my son Luke. And every fourth of July, I thank him for his sacrifice, and God for making him the brave, strong man he was. I wish he were still here, but I also remember that just before he died, we spoke on the phone and he told me how much he believed in what he was doing over there. And anyone who tells me he died for a lie is risking getting knocked on his ass, because I may be 50 years old with cancer, but I'm not dead yet.
My dad went to Germany during World War II for the same reason his grandson went to Iraq - because his country needed him to go. I was lucky enough that there was no war when I came of military age; I enrolled in ROTC in college anyway, because military service is a strong tradition in both sides of my family. Because my back X-rays look sort of like a road map of downtown Dallas, I didn't pass my ROTC physical but I worked as a police officer for three years, so I wound up carrying a gun as a young man anyway.
I think that it would be a good thing for most of our young people to put in some time in either the police or the military, if only to give them perspective on what it takes to make life safe for others. Freedom is not free, and public safety requires that someone not be safe in order that others may live in safety. It's easy to say that; somewhat more difficult to know what it really means. Sometimes it can be very difficult.
It's difficult sometimes to understand other people's perspectives. I can't understand why some people want to come here from other countries and impose their old way of life on those of us who were already here. If these people want to do honor killings and keep sex slaves in their basements (like some of our Muslim guests from Saudi Arabia), people should stay where those loathsome customs are not felonies.
We set up a country where women can expect to be treated decently, and I can't see why the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with all the religious laws they enforce on visitors to their country, can't understand that their filthy way of treating women is not only frowned on here, it is a crime. We don't stop enforcing the law on people because their homelands float on oil. As much complicity as the Saudi royal family had in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they should be sincerely grateful to their distorted vision of God that we didn't just decide to use nuclear weapons on them to deliver justice.
I don't understand people who come here with a sob story about how hard life is where they're from, then expect to get away with crapping on other people once they're here. In America, we ALL follow the law. If you come here and think you're above the law, that you can mistreat other people for the hell of it, expect to see the inside of a jail cell - or to be sent back home if you're not from here. The same rules apply where you're from, guys. We don't need crooks and we don't need people who don't think the law applies to them. If you can't deal with that, go home.
I think sometimes that we set fireworks off on the Fourth of July because they are a contentious way to celebrate, and we're a pretty contentious nation. We don't worship consensus; we arrive at consensus after contending, more often than not. Not necessarily warfare, and not necesarily gunfire, but even our marriages can resemble war at times.
When you think about it, freedom means that people sometimes have conflict. Resources can be limited at times; not everyone can have what he or she wants if there's not enough to go around. The test of a viable society is how it handles conflict, not whether or not there is any.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution, like it or not, acknowledges that conflicts can sometimes be so heated that people require weapons to defend themselves from the strong and the politically powerful. All the hand-waving about monopolies of armed force for the state, and the Second Amendment applying only to the National Guard, are nonsense.
Our Founding Fathers had just come from a long conflict that started when they had had to pick up weapons because their conflict with the British government could not be solved by reason or law. They fully intended (or at least George Mason and Thomas Jefferson did) that if that situation were to happen again, that the American people would be able to defend themselves from their own government.
(It's ironic that left-wingers love gun control when they are so fond of shrieking about "rights" that don't even exist in the constitution, such as the "right" to privacy, the "right" to have federally-funded abortions, the "right" to compel employers to grant spousal benefits to same-sex couples and to compel governments to extend the legal protections of marriage to relationships which are not marriages. I guess the idea of defending these "rights" with guns is ridiculous on the face of it, while defending your right to be secure in your property or your life with a gun makes instinctive sense, even to someone who believes in artificial "rights" that do not flow from a natural understanding of the proper relationship between man and society. Liberals just instinctively realize that their "rights" will ultimately conflict with authentic rights as the Founding Fathers recognized them.)
Liberals are so wedded to the idea of gun control because they believe the government has the answer to every question and should be able to impose those answers on every citizen. That was their perspective. We've just allowed the courts to lie to us about the situation because we have been too lazy to fight for every one of our rights, every time. When we decide not to contend for our rights, we should expect to lose them.
