We may have a dagger of irreconcilable differences to strike down Barack Obama in the gladiators’ arena while we debate our fate in the next four years or so, but no American in his right mind would want the president to fail in a hostile freaking world where when the United States fails means at the end of the rope we hang ourselves dead by the neck.
We have such a damning reason to share our individual light of wisdom with this new president that he may not stumble in the dark. I cannot speak for others with a free mind of their own, but I am sharing mine with him right now: Mr. Obama must know that there is a trapdoor of advocacy between Liberalism on the edge and Conservatism in extremis. Once a diehard with a one-track mind is trapped, there is no way out!
Obama cannot be or should not be a leftist revolutionary president for change that he had been drumbeating to the world during the last election campaign that scared the hell out of millions of Americans.
Now that he is president, Obama can no longer be an ideological crusader for socialism the way Bill Ayers is or has been, nor can he be a conservative extremist in the shoes of Timothy James McVeigh or Theodore Kaczynski whose passion for reform is anchored on hate and violence.
Remember the spiteful ideologues of the extreme Left battering this nation not too long ago? America was a victim of the violent activities of the Weather Underground. The leader, Bill Ayers notoriously known as “the radical American bomber of the violent 1960s” vehemently opposed the war in Vietnam. He is a former associate of the president-elect when he was a community organizer in Chicago; and Ayers is now in the academe actively campaigning to turn America into a socialist state.
You may recall also the very angry right-wingers represented by the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unibomber that terrorized the nation. Their violent revolution for change clashed with that of the far Left in intensity turning us all into a bunch of losers in the eyes of the world.
Those extreme forces in the opposite sides of the great divide have one thing in common: Their deep passion to change the world – their kind of “rebellion” or “revolution” comes from the dark side … a place of choice that we free people all have, but too scary for the president of the United States to be!
So my concluding advice to Obama is, when the opposite dark contenders in the great divide battle their cause to win the spotlight to change America, for him the safe way is to stay in the middle.
That having said with a careful ounce of caution than a pound of reckless indifference, still I would like to climb the belfry of concern and ring the bell of alarm for Obama so that he would be careful and watchful of all his decisions and actions, in behalf of and for the good of the American people, whether or not they voted for him in the last presidential election.
One of the most telling conservatisms my ever-continuing research on this subject had ever stumbled upon that could divide and in the long run destroy the nation, was one espoused by Sen. Phil Gramm. It appeared in the “International Herald Tribune” on May 8, 1995. The Texas Senator attacked the New Deal and the Great Society on welfare that created the nation’s “social safety net”, as “… a hammock that is robbing the country of freedom and virtue.” This crusading thought for political expediency is totally devoid of human compassion for the poor whose fault is not indolence but of malfunctioning equal opportunity.
The “safety net” allegory reflects on the image of a citizen who is having a hard time in life thus figuratively speaking, is walking the tightrope. This tightrope is a narrow and perilous moral path, and walking on it means that the citizen is working hard with skill and dedication, yet all but the most skilled are bound to fall. Without a net to catch those who fall, we have a nation of the homeless, let alone a general feeling of homelessness in an otherwise affluent society.
Just think of those who are off the high rope, temporarily or permanently socially disconnected when they lost their job for many reasons … when becoming disabled, for having a severe health condition that forfeits the ability to earn, when different kinds of misfortune strike one’s life, and so forth and so on … you name it.
Welfare is not really contemptible but compatible to those taxpayers whose concerns for the commonweal are not only in their purse but also in their heart. We become a government of relief and assistance to our citizenry and to the world when the need arises and we can still afford it.
Internationally, our commitment is a matter of foreign policy written in stone since our founding fathers signed the document of our nationhood with their blood. We erected an everlasting monument to it as a national pledge to humanity – the Statue of Liberty.
In the local scene, temporary support is provided by the government’s social programs until the unfortunate and the economically disadvantaged pull up again and get back on the tightrope, while assistance in many forms is provided to the disabled. To disengage from being a humane society even to animals let alone to human beings by condemning this socially decreed “safety net”, as “a hammock that is robbing the country of freedom and virtue” is to our wounded mind, similar to if not worse than that extreme Rightist Oklahoma City bombing that terribly injured this nation and forever left an ugly scar in our living memory.
Stereotyping those who live on welfare manifests a high degree of lack of empathy, and when viewed philosophically, extreme narrow-mindedness. Tightrope walking is caused by many situational factors other than just laziness [this poverty-cause-factor is almost an insignificant percentage of the whole welfare recipients], mostly misfortunes that befall on one’s life.
I can never forget the case of this hardworking colleague professor who for some reasons his wife and two children had left him to live alone in his house. He lost his fortune in a protracted family lawsuit, and his industry was cut short when he caught a terminal cancer.
Until the end, this scholar was figuratively “lying in the hammock” of social legislation, piteously dependent on public succor. Devoid of empathy, heartless Conservative extremists would have written in this man’s epitaph the following: “Up to the end, here lies the lazy man on Gramm’s hammock”. For me it is a tearful memory of a friend who would have died out of a radical Conservative mean-spiritedness.
On the other hand, the rejection of extreme liberalism on moral grounds is plain commonsense. But when one is also compulsively addicted to hating conservatism, it is as hard as when junkies struggle to stay away from drugs.
Most often than not, radicalism of the Left is abhorrently odious. Street protests are too vulgar and violent to be publicly acceptable. Spitting on veterans while demonstrating against the war in Iraq the protesters thought was “illegal” as what happened in a nationally televised January 27, 2007 leftwing organized protests in Washington, D.C., is even more unwarranted and loathsome than when our standard societal mores are violently scandalized.
We are mesmerized by this façade of politically dedicated Liberals fighting intolerance and inhumanity to others, and for a government that would willingly stand up for, not abscond, social responsibility. However, jumping over the edge in extremis is as contemptible as the Oklahoma City bombing of the extreme Right. It is as objectionable because the conceptualized freedom to act is so distorted and recklessly misplaced that the danger to society is deceptively insidious to prevent.
No less than President Bill Clinton demonstrated this to himself. The right of teenagers [the experience of his younger years] “to sniff” or “to smoke a little bit of marijuana” just to find out what it is all about, was one of Clinton’s painful public crucifixion in his version of individual freedom. It is similar to trying a poison on one’s self to prove if it works.
It’s like jumping naked over a mile-deep cliff of the Grand Canyon, just to find out if you can fly, or if you would die when you hit the rocks at the bottom and wonder if your body will break into pieces.
This freedom to be just curious and to sample the essence of tragedy in order to be wiser is neither advisable nor acceptable. Nobody has more than one life to spare to validate the folly of such experiment.
On personal discipline, Bill Clinton’s political graveyard is his failure to give priority attention to social morality and responsibility which happened to be admirable, rather than to selfish individual morality and responsibility, which when it goes out of hand, is despicable. The material witness to this catastrophe was Monica Lewinsky. Too much freedom of the libido can defile the Oval Office.
Obama must keep in mind that feminism and gay rights are sticky issues for a liberal make-over to rationalize their cause for public acceptance. Gays have rights as ordinary person like that which you and I have. What makes them different from us is their sexual orientation. As long as their sexual behavior does not harm anyone in particular, and the public in general, they have their equal rights to pursue their own peace and happiness.
What is probably troubling to many is the absolute freedom of gays to practice legalized “gayism” in an altruistic society where tolerance of a unique exception becomes the general societal norm.
An example of the objectionable of which about 65% of American majority abhors as a moral distortion is when marriage in the civil code is redefined to be no longer exclusive between man and woman only but also between the same sex.
This was recently defeated in California when Californians voted for Proposition 8.
The problem is, this freedom of the Liberals to do what one sees fit, could lead to one marrying anyone else regardless of blood relations or marrying something else. I don’t think that for the moment, our civilized world is prepared to absorb the shock of these free-for-all distortions of marriage.
I recall I have read in the Internet sometime in the past an old rich widow who lived alone in another state by herself, proudly announcing to the world her support for legalized sexless marriages – she wanted to marry her cats! Of course it turned out to be a joke to me, although it was actually happening in the real world.
Although the motive behind the exercise of free choice in the extreme of liberalism is heretofore unknown, the general public deserves a warning – especially President Obama -- that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions.
Again the problem with liberalism in extremist is not just credibility but also coherence. Conservatives are known to be systemic; they are organized as a solid force to peddle their values to the American public.
But don’t fault the truth of this statement by saying that the Republicans lost in the last presidential election because they were not “a solid force” in selling their American values to the voting public. Take note of the fact I am referring to the Conservatives, not to the Republican Party which was so weak and politically fragmented.
It was impossible for the Republicans to win in the last presidential election because their candidate, Republican maverick John McCain and the Democrat Party were both attacking the Republicans. The only Conservative candidate in the last electoral contest was Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But she was not a Republican candidate for president.
Notwithstanding all these, President Obama must not forget to remember the important lessons of the last election. What has been written about the Liberals in moral leadership is that, the progressive hierarchy misunderstood its own politics as a coalition of interest groups.
The truth is, the Liberals are as disjointed and scrappy as the Republicans are. With the extreme Left and the moderate Liberals pulling each other in different directions, arguing their platform in public is an uphill struggle that makes their cause hardly credible.
I have written an editorial about the Liberals’ shotgun criticisms of the United States’ intrusion on world affairs under the title U.S. Meddling: Don’t Shoot Bullets of Ignorance that appeared in the websites of American Chronicle and affiliates on July 14, 2005. It was critical of the Liberals’ directionless party leadership.
Unfortunately, hard core Liberal activists had taken over AC’s editorial management staff and this important published report read by millions nationwide and worldwide was too much for their cause, and was removed from the sites at the height of the then coming hotly contested November 4, 2008 presidential election. However, the original copyright copy is retained and it is currently on file.
Conservative and Liberal extremists are competing cutthroats in the suppression of free speech. There is no doubt about it.
Just recently politicized members of the left-leaning Media held free journalism hostage in the quest for power. We were flabbergasted witnesses to how they suppressed Sarah Palin’s free speech before they cut her down to pieces making her looked like a lost Katzenjammer Kid in the comic strip.
If Obama chooses to stay in the middle, he should brace himself for this powerful pull of gravity from his Liberal counterparts in the far Left and their restless entourage of street activists. He could not afford to let those forces from the dark side win the misguided into their fold. Their way leads to the gate of Hell.
It is my hope that this editorial memorandum to President Obama is not an insurance deductible that covers the hazards of militant Liberalism we must all pay in the ledger of moral accounting.
Now that President Obama is behind the wheel armed with the people’s power, he should take the middle of the road when he drives us all to this nation’s written destiny. #
© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Freedomsphoenix.com access December 05, 2008.
The writer is an award-winning journalist. Know more about the author by reading his published editorials and feature articles or you may e-mail your comment at ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg
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