A First for My Fourth

I always have loved the 4th of July. It is pure Americana. No other nation on earth traditionally has shown such joy in celebrating its creation. I have been to lots and lots of national day celebrations around the world. Most are at best joyless affairs, e.g., lift a glass to the monarch, and many involve a lot of whining, e.g., everything bad is the fault of the colonialists. Ours, however, was always an optimistic, happy event in which we praised the wisdom of our English forefathers--even those of us with no British blood at all--while we celebrated the fact that we had remained more loyal to the principles of English freedom than had the England of 1776.

For the first time, I am having a hard time, very hard time, recapturing that air of optimism. Everywhere one looks, one sees the ravages of the semi-totalitarian ideology that has seized our ever-growing government, stifling the economy, no doubt, but also the very essence of what it means to be an American. We love our Constitution and its Bill of Rights in a way one sees in no other country. We invented and then made our capital, Washington DC, into an architectural monument of praise to our political institutions and leaders, again, in a manner that is unprecedented. We now find, however, that city and those amazing institutions firmly in the grip of a vile bunch of mountebanks, incompetents, historical illiterates, and haters of the very American spirit that built the country from a fledging coastal colony on the edge of a vast wilderness into the freest and greatest economic and military power in history.

Obama and his clowns, unfortunately, form just the tip of the iceberg. Our schools, colleges, and universities, once the greatest on earth, grind out an endless link sausage of brainwashed liberal stooges, most with no discernible useful skills and few with any knowledge of the basic facts of a free economy, the principles of democracy, including the importance of individual rights, or of the history of the men and women who made this country. They are babblers of politically correct, socially sanctioned nonsense--and each little sausage paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the corrupt education industry for the privilege of being stupid. They want and want more and more, and can give back less and less. They have been trained to see life as a series of problems requiring more and more government, and more and more ceding of our rights to the bureaucrats. We have become Europe. George Washington would not approve.

It is hard to be optimistic on July 4, 2013.

WLA