A Time To Choose

The last few days, I've been griping to friends and family about the possibility of a sweeping defeat--not just the White House, but the Congress to, and what that would mean. My frustration, I told them, stemmed from the feeling that our backs were against the wall. Not so for the other side. For one thing, even if socialist policies weren't implemented on the national level, they could it could still be done on the state level. That way, we could choose based on our own beliefs whether we wanted to be a part of a socialist state or a free state. Consent of the governed is, of course, one of our fundamental principles. But they want to do it on a federal level, to cram it down our throats (or more accurately, to take our labor and property from us) whether we like it or not. So they give us no such option. And if the United States doesn't flip over to European-style socialism, they still have other foreign states to choose from, if that's what they really believe in. Again, if we don't hold the line, we have no such option.

If freedom dies here, that's it. Game over.

I was poking around the intertubes and found that someone else had expressed this same view, but much more eloquently. I shouldn't have been surprised who it was.

[I]t has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.

I know we've still got a month to go and a lot can change in that time. We'll probably even see a change in the polls thanks to the debate undoing some of the media spin over the last few weeks. But I can't help the feeling that even if we win this time, we've still lost. Because as much as socialism has been discredited, we the People, collectively, no longer have the character necessary to be free men and women. If we did, then promises about what the government could "provide" to us would not win votes. If we did, then we wouldn't have passed a "bail-out" of businesses without so much as having a public discussion about why, and which, businesses had a legitimate claim to taxpayers' money.

I don't want to abandon all hope just yet, but I don't want to paint a naively optimistic view of the future, either. A permanent socialist majority is a possibility in the medium-term. And if that were to come to pass, it would mark a fundamental change in the nature of our Republic.

But it's not lost yet.