The United States of America: A turnaround story

But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. 

 -- Nancy Pelosi

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. 

 -- Rahm Emanuel

The people of the United States made a serious mistake in November 2008. But, given the cards they were dealt by our present-day party political system, I can't judge them that harshly. They were credulous, overly trusting; but that isn't the worst of faults. The majority's motives were decent. They liked the idea of a president who talked about diluting the ideological differences among us, and above all, who seemed (and spoke) like a someone who could cross the racial divide and even, possibly, engender a post-racial America.

Nor can I put down the electorate for rejecting the opposition party's simulacrum of a candidate, a brain-damaged void who stood for nothing except continuing open borders and political correctness. He may not have realized that he didn't really want to be president, but the people were smarter than he was, and understood.

That was then. The ensuing two years have, I hope, taught enough if not all of us that we sowed the wind. We elected as our head of state a Man Without a Country, a smooth-talking affirmative action hire with a head full of left-wing zombie dust.

His two years in office have let out the latent illness that had been in the national bloodstream since the 1960s, perhaps much longer, but which our natural antibodies had previously been a match for. Now, the sickness reached the heart.

Blaming Obama personally is beside the point. He is, as a result of a bizarre and contradictory background, a lost soul looking to make himself whole, and there is no shame in that. Unfortunately, he has looked for wholeness in all the wrong places: in identification with ethnic groups, the more "Other" the better. His identity is bound up with anyone who seems to him to represent an alternative to the country to which he promised "hope" and "change," whose specifics neither he nor his adopted country were very clear about.

He released forces that possibly even he does not understand: of racial resentment, cultural Marxism, Keynesian economics, and elevating The State to the directorship of every level of life. We discovered, not in some African backwater, but at home what unscrupulous government means. Obama and his -- acolytes or handlers, take your choice -- Pelosi and Reid gave us the demonstration.

In the most blatant example, legislation to transform health care into yet another aspect of society controlled by government was enacted through a 2,000-plus-page bill that no one read in its entirety, which the majority of people wanted nothing to do with. And -- no small factor in our circumstances today -- we learned that our president is incapable of understanding how militant Islam would overturn everything we hold dear in exchange for a theocratic absolutism.

Two years of an amateurish but heavy-handed administration is long enough to teach many lessons, and the signs are that the American people as a whole, God bless them, have caught on.

We need change that we can believe in, with full comprehension and in line with our constitutional tradition. No election year can accomplish that, but it can begin to restore what we have all but lost.

We can look past recent errors to the history that guides us more truly. We can understand, with a shock of recognition, what the people who gave our country birth were willing to risk all for. When Ben Franklin said, on the signing of the Declaration of Independence, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately," he was not making an idle quip. Had the colonies not prevailed against England, he and Thomas Jefferson and their fellow revolutionaries would have been hanged by the neck until dead. In those times, the English hanged pickpockets; rebels would have been lucky to get a trial.

Fortunately we do not have to face such drastic consequences today. But like our country's founders, enough of us see we are approaching a point of no return, when the power of The State will run not only our economy but our daily lives, reducing local and state government to shadows, our individuality to whatever favored or disfavored ethnic group defines us to our rulers. We can draw inspiration from those who risked everything to give us the liberty that we still enjoy, scoured as it is. 

"... Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." We cannot consent anymore to a self-serving Congress and an ideology-driven president. We have a serious crisis, and now it is our turn to say that we will not let it go to waste. Everything that has led to it tells us what to do on Tuesday, November 2, to begin the turnaround.