A Personal Promise To Jacob

Earlier today Hunter posted a piece called "We Tell Our Sorrows To The Stones".  It's an excellent statement of resolve, and I want my signature added to it.  In it, one thing he addresses is the question of whether the actions of the left are based more in simple stupidity, or whether they are more to be seen as "evil". If you haven't already done so, I urge you to read it for yourself.  Sadly, apart from the koolaid drinkers on the left, the one person in America who would be most enlightened by it, the man it's addressed to, won't read it. 

My problems with Mr Obama are not based, as the left insists, on anything having to do with race.  Nor are they  based solely on disagreements over policy, or on abstractions about the direction he wants to take the country.  My problems with him, at their foundation, are deeply personal.  I deeply resent, on a personal level, the threat he poses to my grandchildren's future.  Jacob is three years old.  His birthday is coming up, and I owe him something.  Generations of Americans have built a place where we have all been allowed to believe in our right and ability to guide our own future.  We were told, and in a million ways we've told our children, that there is no limit to what they can achieve if they just work hard and believe in themselves.  That belief in ourselves and in our ability to live up to the promise this nation holds forth, is the very thing that makes it possible.  We can, simply because we say we can. 

That simple awareness has worked since this nation was founded, but now, for the first time, there are people who have seized power who think that Freedom, born of self determination, can be replaced by the guidance of the state.  They are busy working at the kind of "change" that will replace that Freedom with some gray kind of existence where everything is measured not in terms of personal achievement, but in terms of "fairness", which we are told is only achievable if we surrender all autonomy to the state.

That is a lie, of course, as history has proven over and over. "Fairness" is not the goal they're seeking at all.  All they want is power, pure and simple, and such lies are put forth to confuse and mollify us while they perfect that power.  Everybody understands that is their game, what their hubris hides from them is the fact that, in the end, they'll fail because they grossly underestimate our commitment to that Freedom.  For millenia, people lived as serfs, their choices and their very thoughts managed by tyrants.  That is still going on today in most of the world, but we, by the grace of God and our own will, broke free of that when we founded this nation. The forces on the left seem not to understand that, and they proceed at their own peril.  

I personally can't imagine that the left isn't able to understand the threat their ideas pose to our children.  I don't think they're stupid enough not to grasp it, I think they simply don't  care.  Their goals trump everything else, no matter how much destruction they leave in their wake.  That requires a level of cynicism that can only be described as evil.

Regardless of what drives the left, stupidity or outright evil, there are millions of us out here who will see that they don't succeed.  Once again, Atlas will shrug.  The things this country has always stood for will continue, whatever it takes.  As a personal matter, other people made such a promise to me, and I owe nothing less to Jacob.