Lifes lessons

In my 69 years on this earth I have been very fortunate to be blessed with a loving family, many successes and of course a quite a few failures. During this time I have formed a set of opinions that I share weekly here in this forum. These opinions are based on my life’s lessons not on any politician’s talking points or right or left leaning professor’s theories. As many of you know I tend to share my thoughts whether they are popular or not. Something that is uppermost on my mind in today’s America, is the lack of appreciation for what we have been given. The knowledge that our grandparents and in many cases our parents, made do with so much less and seemed so much happier in their lives is amazing. My parents for example were the son and daughter of poor immigrants. Married in 1925 they made it through 10 years of depression, two World Wars and Korea never having the safety net as the government calls it of the Welfare System on even medical insurance. They successfully raised 3 sons, purchased a home and auto, all the time making sure we all had the opportunity for a good education, and were properly fed and clothed. We were each raised knowing our obligation and responsibility to our country’s service and respecting the freedoms we were handed.


Heaven forbid that my mother had to sew much of our clothing, and did so after traveling across the city and working 8 hours in a hot drycleaners. To think that now we have generation after generation of Welfare recipients who have never worked a day in their lives is unbelievable. We created this mess over the years by adding more and more so called entitlements and making our government progressively bigger and bigger.

No, I’m not advocating doing away with the Welfare System. Doing that would cause a panic in the inner cities of this country that would make what is happening in Greece seem like child’s play. I do think that we should start teaching from elementary school upwards the theory of personal responsibility. I remember vividly a line from Kennedy’s inauguration, “Ask not what your Country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your Country.” It’s funny that I would pick a line from what was considered at the time a liberal, but Kennedy’s liberalism would be akin to today’s conservative movement.

The liberalism of Obama, Pelosi and Reid, supported by people like Michael Moore and George Soros, haven’t a clue as to what that line meant to millions of hard working Americans at the time. Johnson’s Great Society and the subsequent so called entitlements that have sprung from the far left has left this country on the verge of bankruptcy. I hate to use the word ‘progressives’ as in my mind their theories are about as regressive as I have ever seen, but it’s the progressives of both parties that have advocated and empowered the government to grow beyond our forefather’s wildest nightmare. The people are beginning to stir and as we have seen all across this country when they awaken they have done so in an extremely angry mood. The Tea Party you hear so much talk about is not a political party or a wing of the Republican Party, but common thread that is just beginning to weave the fabric of this Great Nation back to liberty and what will once again be a constitutional form of government.