Sunday, January 17, 2010

We Have A Once In A Generation Opportunity, Let's Not Waste It.

This summer a long held dream was playing out on my television set. To watch a groundswell of Americans wake up from their Rip Van Winkle nap and get mad enough to show up at town halls and tea parties all across America truly brought tears to my eyes. After years of wondering if anything would ever get the people's attention away from their entertainments long enough to save America from her own government, here they were, awake, and passionate!

Our family had, at my father's request, kept him away from any news or any conversations about what Obama and his regime were doing. Dad is fighting cancer and it simply upset him too much, he wanted to do everything he could to keep his attitude up and positive. One day he was crying because he had this vivid dream about a movement that was beginning coming from the people fighting back for their country. It was then we told him that, thought it might have been a dream that he learned this, it was a dream that was coming true. It was the day of the 9/12 march on Washington and we turned on the coverage so he could see for himself, this was a very special day indeed!

One of the most common laments that those of us who have been in the fight for years was, "How can we get people to pay attention." How can we get people's focus off of "Who shot J.R"., or "The Simpson's", or "American Idol" long enough for them to understand just what was going on in the assault on theirs and their children's freedoms? Most of us, were like me, the guy in the company who "was into politics." You could see people's eyes glaze over if you tried to talk about it, but light up when they talked about last night sitcom. It appears that all it took was for us to be within moments of losing it all. However, thank God it wasn't after it was too late and all was already lost.

As much as I am thrilled by the prairie fire of new converts to the cause, I want to put forth just a bit of caution and a bit of history. I am seeing a very disturbing trend growing within this movement, a growing division among those who have like ideas right when we need to be coming together. On my Facebook friends list I have several hundred conservatives from all over the country. If you are politically conservative, or at least open to civil discussion, you are welcome on my friends list. I have all kinds of factions, GOP, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and more, who cares what label people like, we all need to come together, communicate, and then work together to put those who are most like us in office to take back our country.

For those of you who are new to the fight starting during this last year or so, let me give you a little information. I am hearing a real contempt for anyone who came before to the fight, there is a tendency to see too much painting with a broad brush against everyone in office, or who were part of the party before the tea parties came to life. Let me tell you, there have been many who have been fighting this exact fight for decades before you started paying attention. We have been fighting liberal Democrats, RINOs, and blue blood Republicans for a long time. It is just that we were doing it in a vacuum, because we couldn't get you to pay attention.

For me it started during Jimmy Carter, I joined the Ronald Reagan campaign in 1980 as well as for Dan Quail to unseat ultra-liberal Senator Birch Bayh, Evan's dad, as well as Don Nickles' campaign in Oklahoma. We fought the same type of people who we are fighting today.

I was very involved in fighting a hugely liberal movement during the first two years of Bill Clinton's administration. If you recall we the people defeated the Hilarycare that time without the Internet as a tool, we fought with mass voice mail, faxes, and phones, and shoe leather. We defeated the Omnibus Education Bill that buried deep within would have created an agency to oversee every parent to make sure that you were raising your children in a positive parenting, politically correct environment. If you were a "high risk" parent, someone who owned a gun, worked for a police dept., ever was in the military, was a professed born again Christian, or was building or remodeling a house, you would have mandatory monthly visits, and if they found something "wrong" they could take your children right then. After we defeated these things, we replaced the Democrat majority with Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America effectively stopping the Clinton liberal agenda. He then moved to the middle and took credit for the economic turnaround.

What I would like you to consider is that we are thrilled you have joined the fight, now we all can win. There is a great energy right now, people are awake. However, please don't take this as an insult, but our schools have done a very poor job of educating our electorate in civics, history, and economics for decades. It is no wonder most Americans have little or no understanding of any of them. Please start learning and making sure your kids learn them, it is only through an educated electorate can we ever keep our Republic safe from internal destruction. Those who have it under attack have succeeded as far as they have due to Americans not paying attention or understanding when they did.

What we need to do if we want to succeed is to come together. We need to quit eating our own, it is very distressing to see attacks on Palin and Brown. Are either perfect, no, but they are both better than most. We need to find our common beliefs and work on the differences later. We all need to get behind the same candidates next fall, the primary is for trying to get "our guy" in, but after the primary we need to get lockstep behind "our shared guy" and get them in over "their guy." The last thing we need is third parties splitting votes and giving the Democrats a free pass to stay in power.

If Joe Kennedy was truly a patriot who believes what he says he does, he would step down before Tuesday's race and beg his followers to vote for Scott Brown. The 2-5% who are following Kennedy could be the difference if we stop Obamacare or not. If Brown wins we win, if Coakley wins Obama wins.

My favorite analysis for this is too often our own infighting reminds me of a couple standing in the dining room fighting over what color to paint the walls while the house is burning down around them. Wouldn't it be much better if we all came together to put out the fire, then we could argue all you like about what color to paint those walls.

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