Final Stretch: Voting For Liberty & Against Tyranny
“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.” Vince Lombardi
Four years ago my father had back surgery so I went to Texas to help take care of him. That was the month I was forced to watch…Fox News. (Cue ominous music.)
I’m using the word ‘forced’ because my parents live in an underground house far out in the country and I didn’t have a car—so I was literally trapped inside, watching Fox almost 24/7. Like most people who only watch the mainstream media, I had been brainwashed into thinking networks like ABC, CBS and NBC were “real” and that Fox was (fill in the blank: extremists, alarmists, biased, one-sided)…But there I was in East Texas, where the entire universe stopped at 5 p.m. for the Glenn Beck show and I had no choice but to watch. At first I was skeptical; I tried to read a book through the program or play computer games. But after a few days something “clicked” and by the time I got home I was a full-fledged political activist. Four years later, almost everything Glenn Beck said would happen did, indeed, happen. (Thank you, Mom and Dad!)
Thing is, there’s a funny thing about the truth—you can try to deny it, re-word it, explain it away but in the end as Dr. King perfectly said, “the truth will set you free.”
Standing up for what you believe in is sometimes very lonely. Every Conservative I know has lost many friends over the last four years. People who work full-time jobs and are raising families have devoted much of their spare time toward political activism. Last night our very busy Virginia PolitiChick Jin Ah Jin did a radio interview for PolitiChicks Nation from her garage because her SIX children were “too noisy”. Our West Virginia PolitiChick Karen O’Day sent me a message apologizing for not submitting more articles. “I’ve been campaigning nonstop for Romney and our local Congressional and Gubernatorial candidates,” Karen said. “My kids help, going door-to-door with me.”
These people—and everyone like them–have my unending respect and I am constantly in awe of their commitment and courage and tireless dedication.
No matter what the outcome of this election is, Obama has definitely done what he set out to do in “fundamentally transforming” America–but perhaps not in the way he originally intended. Following Charles de Gaulle’s belief that “politics are too serious a matter to be left to politicians”, a new breed of Conservative activism has been born. Words like “Tea Party” and “New Media” are now part of our everyday vocabulary. Activists like Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin are our new American heroes and, finally, a new type of “citizen politician” is emerging—regular working-class folks that are reluctantly offering to take a stand and run for office.
This “new” America has occurred in part because of Obama’s socialistic policies but also because of the terrifying realization that our freedoms—once taken for granted—can and will be annihilated if left unattended. Fortunately we will never go back to the country we were before; there are too many of us who will work to our dying day to ensure we never revert to those times of apathy and indifference again.
If Governor Romney wins, we have new battles to fight. We have to stay vigilant in keeping all our politicians on track and to continuously remind them just whom they work for. Being “cushy” in Washington should never have been an option in the first place so we need to make sure that anyone who runs for office is doing it for the right reasons and not simply as a tax-paid “career”.
If Barack Obama wins, his own words and actions have made very clear what his intentions are, and everyone—on both sides of the political fence—should be concerned. As my friend Frank Gaffney told me, “If we give [Obama] another four more years, he will feel unconstrained in what he does to this country…and thereby free to finish the job of fundamentally transforming the country and I think in doing so would make it unrecognizable and really not America anymore.”
If you choose not to vote (for whatever strange reason), that in itself is your vote. William E. Simon said, “Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote.” (Send me a message and I will be happy to provide you with a very long list of examples of this…)
The greatest thing I’m hearing in these final days before the election is that although people are exhausted, they will never rest as long as their country is in trouble. Who could’ve imagined that in 2012, mothers, business owners and non-military citizens would be saying, “I would die for my country”? They’re saying this for the same reasons our pioneer ancestors said it–because when backed up against the wall by tyrants or bullies, Americans will never submit. It’s in our blood to fight as hard as we possibly can and to never give up.
God bless all of you, and God bless America. Let’s turn this ship around.
