It does make us happy to take responsibility, exercise discipline, work hard, accumulate wealth, marry and raise children, and give our families a bright future. Some people are unhappy in any circumstances, but no one is happy trapped in the modern American pathology-network.
There is a lie in our minds that it has become economically feasible for lots and lots of us to live in this pathogenic manner, but the evidence is all around us that we can’t. Our unfunded federal obligations now total more than 8 times our entire annual GDP. Most of our federal budget every year goes to entitlement programs. But the problem is larger than that. How many young men and women have been squeezed out of productive life by the pathologies of welfarism? How many abortions and STDs, how many lives ruined by drugs and alcohol, how many gang killings do we need, before we will acknowledge that it is not a good idea for government to subsidize pathogenic living?
I believe Americans are waking up to reality. Perhaps it took the Obama presidency to reveal to enough minds the ugly deceptions behind the talking points of the left. The now nearly mindless and painfully predictable shrieking of the left’s most unseemly pundits – and even of some of its politicians – comes off as a death scream. The MSM will continue its fantasy-narrative generation, but the public has seen what Obama the Savior has wrought, and it’s collapsing businesses, dying jobs, and crony-tending with the taxpayers’ indenture, as far as the eye can see.
People do seek the truth. They do want to live well, by their own efforts and according to the moral code of God, in ways that are satisfying and rewarding. They respond with overwhelming capacities to challenges. We aren’t cut out to live the way the 1960s-era radical left has been determined – for nearly 50 years now – that we will. It doesn’t work. The inconsistencies and invalid propositions have us bursting at the seams.
I think Americans are waking up to that, and will recognize that the first step is changing presidents in January. No, the voters aren’t stupid. Too many have been misled for too long, but we still have what our Founders endowed us with: a public square in which we are free to encourage and persuade each other. I believe more and more Americans are listening, and thinking critically again. I don’t know if we will have a universally honest and fair vote in November, but I do believe we won’t have a stupid one.
Visit J.E. Dyer’s blog, the Optimistic Conservative.
