Clarity Crafted from Common Sense!
A massive show of political unity at home will affect
troop morale, on both sides!
Let’s face it; we are all liberals, no matter how
conservative we may be. The Puritans who founded
America
conquered dangers and disasters to win religious freedom, but they were
liberals. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin depicted a rattlesnake cut into eight
sections in his Pennsylvania Gazette. The eight sections of snake symbolized
eight eastern seaboard colonies and the caption said “Join or Die!” It was a
call to arms during the French and Indian war. By 1776, an image of a coiled
rattlesnake, with “Don’t Tread on Me”, became an American icon of
independence and a battle cry engrained in the Spirit of ’76.
What is different about the liberalism of the Puritans
and the liberalism of the progressive movement in
America
today? In a word, the difference is morality. The Puritans personified deeply
held, Bible based morality with their liberalism. When morality is stripped away
from liberalism, the result is 30 million aborted babies over thirty years,
legalized sodomy and the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), all
protected by the immoral ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
Born in 1954, I was a classic Love Generation,
anti-Vietnam War liberal, living at the speed of party! It is unbelievable; what
our generation has lived through. The sexual revolution, women’s lib, the
music revolution, the recreational drug awakening, the Civil Rights marches, the
nuclear arms race, the space race, the information revolution spawned by the
computer, the internet, satellites and cell phones are just part of what we have
witnessed! What a wonderful life and evolution of our democracy, in our time!
Our choices for president in 1972, when I turned
eighteen and got a draft card, were Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. I did not
vote that year. Most profound, perhaps, we stopped the Vietnam War to protect
those poor rice farmers, from US troops. We quit and came home. Then, between
1975 and 1978, the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered about three million of
those peasants who we demonstrated in US streets to protect, from US troops. How
foolish we were!
The lesson is clear: really bad guys immediately fill
the muscle void when good men stand down and go home. Those who rallied our
utopian filled minds to stop the war were mostly silent about the genocide that
ensued, after US troops were withdrawn. Our killed and wounded were sacrificed
in great numbers. In the end, their mission and our allies were simply abandoned
by Congress and our divided nation.
We grew up with Why We Fight, Victory At Sea, Combat,
Black Sheep Squadron, Rat Patrol and other programs about WWII, the death camps
and the cost of freedom on TV. This type of programming saturated the few
over-the-air channels and we found it educational, entertaining and fascinating.
Many of us still find it fascinating. It was all about the gritty, epic struggle
between freedom and tyranny and it was very patriotic!
The Rifleman, Leave It To Beaver, Gunsmoke, My Three
Sons, Bonanza, The Waltons,
Wild
Kingdom
and All In The Family are just a few programs I recall that were favorites for
lighter entertainment. And the Ed Sullivan show. It was all pretty wholesome
fare and we loved it. The
America
of our youth is already gone forever, in case you missed its passing.
We watched in naive befuddlement while the Shah of Iran
was overthrown by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in
Tehran
, who used US hostages as pawns on TV for over a year beginning in 1979.
Interest rates were sky high and lines at gas stations were longer than that.
Our President at the time was a former peanut farmer and most of us watched,
from afar, the rise of radical Islam without understanding it.
As a result of the gasoline shortages that followed,
there was a lot of talk about energy independence. Certainly, the masses of us
did not connect the dots between buying foreign oil and funding terrorism.
Apparently, neither did our elected leaders who were most interested in
re-election, as they almost always are above all else. In retrospect, what in
God’s name were we doing? Oh yeah, partying! We watched while our secular,
modern thinking but despotic ally was swept from power, our Embassy was overrun,
our hostages were traumatized and the rest of us were slowly strangled at the
gasoline pump. We were brain dead.
We watched our principled Ronald Reagan from a distance
with admiration, as did millions worldwide throughout the 1980’s. When Ross
Perot entered politics, he caught everyone’s attention by driving the national
debate for a balanced budget and by opposing NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) with his famous “giant sucking sound” quote. Perot redirected
enough conservative or moderate votes from Bush Forty One to put
Clinton
in the White House.
Bill Clinton really motivated me politically. When
Clinton
said that he did not inhale the marijuana he tried in college, it was obvious
that he was a liar, a scrupulous manipulator and I was motivated against him
immediately. The Adolescent President, Bubba, dragged us all into the abyss of
political and moral relativism where anything goes, as Nixon had done decades
earlier. It was more liberalism without morality.
Rather than recount the long series of terrorist attacks
we suffered and mostly ignored, from Carter’s administration until 9/11, let
it suffice to say that I was already paying attention to politics before 9/11
thanks to Bubba. Now we are aware that we are in the fight of our lives. We have
let the radical ideology of our enemies morph into a giant violent network with
global reach and influence and we even, indirectly, enabled it and still do.
Our strategic goal must be the triumph of human freedom
over tyranny in Muslim countries, for our own safety too. It is in our interest,
is moral and it will take a generation or two for freedom to achieve victory
over this brand of fascism. For non-radicals like most of us, it is bigger than
the cost of oil, revenge or even justice. Because of weapons technology, it is
about survival for which radicals care not. Tactics, tools and diplomacy will
need to adapt and be re-configured for each adverse circumstance until the right
combination is found to achieve long term victory.
The hour is late. Since 1979 our enemies have been at
war with us and teaching their children to be martyrs, en masse. Most of us were
asleep at the wheel until September 11, 2001 and too many of us seem to have
gone back to sleep again. Religious, ideological hatred and technology are
growing against us, so
America
must fight for freedom for others once again. We can not maintain our freedom
alone, we need allies.
While we are divided about the best ways to achieve the
strategic goal of freedom over tyranny, it is clear to most of us that we must
use all of our resources and tools, for generations. Clarity resulted from 9/11
for most baby boomers and that means war, and diplomacy.
Lightning fast global communications show our enemies a
vicious political war internally which makes winning the wars of bullets and
bones infinitely more difficult. Our political division emboldens our enemies to
kill more Americans. They believe we will quit and go home, again. They have
Vietnam
,
Lebanon
and
Somalia
as their proof and recruiting tools. Last but not least, our division
demoralizes our own volunteer military forces.
A massive show of political unity at home is required
because votes affect troop morale on both sides!
Purveyors of propaganda surround us. Seek and you shall
find what our troops’ majority wishes are, but you must work at it. It is not
easy if you prefer polling data of our military over logic. Polling questions
will improve so answers cannot be so easily spun into interpretations not
intended by the military volunteers questioned, if I have my way. When you are
sure you know what our troops’ majority political wishes are, support them
with your votes because only votes count. Our words of support without our votes
being aligned with our troops’ majority political wishes mean nothing.
Our troops and our enemies have connected the dots between votes and troop morale,
on both sides, can you?
Vote as if your life depended on it, because it very
well might. This is how we found clarity, crafted from common sense; the hard
way!
About the Author: Average
Joe Boomer works to help you boost troop morale,
by influencing voters, with his website at www.VoteWithTroops.com
Contact
him at: avgjoeboomer@sbcglobal.net
More articles by avgjoeboomer@sbcglobal.net
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