As The Mainstream Begins To Froth

Finally, Americans are waking up.

President Obama's poll numbers are sliding. Now, for the first time since his inauguration, a majority of Americans (55%) believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Hello! What took so long, people?

Give the President credit: he told us what he wanted to do, and he has been busy doing it. Barack Obama is as far left as you can go without falling off the edge of California. He is a true believer. He has been a committed leftist his entire political life, and he was upfront about his radical philosophy all through the election campaign.

That's why we bitter backwoods conservatives, clinging to our guns and Bibles, kept sounding the alarm last year about the dangers posed to liberty and prosperity by electing a socialist president.

This year, I was proud to join hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who rallied in "Tea Party" protests. Shouldn't the fact that senior citizens (and middle-aged geezers like me) are resorting to street protests for the first time in our lives demonstrate how alarmed mainstream Americans are by the Obama socialist steamroller?

The administration's cries of "crisis, crisis" are getting old. We are still sifting through the droppings of the Cap & Trade fiasco that the House Democrats excreted a few weeks ago, and already the President is rushing through a plan for the federal takeover of health care.

A good leader states his positions clearly, proposes his legislation openly, and then persuades the electorate to embrace his plan. Ronald Reagan was masterful in explaining his agenda. But all we get from the Obama administration is one huge pile of "crisis legislation" after another, that no one has time to understand or debate. How can we respect and follow a leader who repeatedly denies us sufficient time to examine and discuss the plans he is proposing?

Memo to members of Congress: I hate to nitpick, but is it too much to ask of you to READ the thing BEFORE you vote for it? The devil is in the details, and there is boundless room for mischief in a thousand pages of legalese.

Call me crazy, but I am inclined to be distrustful of politicians (a useful instinct that I encourage everyone to cultivate) so I hope I will be forgiven for suggesting the possibility that our elected representatives may try to slide something by us in all of this hullabaloo.

It is a shame that the election of our first black president is destined to become such a disappointment. President Obama could have accomplished great things. He is an extraordinarily gifted politician, with great oratorical skills. He even strikes me, on a personal level, as a nice guy. I'd be happy to sit down sometime with him and Sean Hannity and toss back some suds. I'm not mad at him for being a socialist. I believe he is sincere. I just believe he is sincerely wrong.

If only he had moved to govern more from the political center (as most presidents tend to do) instead of scaring the bejeebers out of the whole country with his obsessive compulsive desire to nationalize every sector of our economy, there might be room for compromise. Had he kept his campaign promises to be bipartisan and transparent, he might have persuaded more of us on the right to give him a chance.

But now, the damage is done. Who in their right mind will ever trust President Obama and his cronies in Congress after witnessing these past six months of government thugocracy? Legislation drafted in the middle of the night, rushed to a vote without being read, relentlessly driving the country deeper into debt, and always - ALWAYS - chiseling away at our personal liberties in the process: all done with a smile and the assurance that Big Brother is just trying to take care of us.

Voters are beginning to smell the coffee. People are realizing that a one-party government with a promiscuous lust for power is not the kind of change they had hoped for.

Despite the political dumbing-down of the population by our educational system (another public entity that makes the case for private enterprise) there are still plenty of voters left who understand that the strength of this country is rooted in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

President Obama is getting ready to discover that, deep down, we Americans really do cherish our freedoms.

And not a moment too soon.

Lefties Go Home!

I'm not trying to be hateful or mean. I'm just giving all you liberals who want the government to take care of you from cradle to grave some helpful advice: move back home. Mom probably still has your room ready.

Do you want to know that someone will be there to take care of all your needs? Move back home!

Tired of having to work every day and worry about your bills? Move back home!

Wondering where your next meal will come from? Move back home!

Are the responsibilities of adulthood bringing you down? Not enough time left in the day to party hardy? Then move back home!

We human beings have short memories. We tend to look at our present tribulations in life and pine nostalgically for the "good old days" while conveniently forgetting that they were never really that good either.

It's tough being an adult. Life is hard. Things often don't go as we had planned. Often we struggle, and fail, and sometimes we hit the wall. Wake up, boys and girls, this is life in the real world - not always fun, not always easy - just reality.

So when I advise you lefties to move back home, and save the rest of us the trouble of redesigning our entire system of government to take care of you, I want you to think about what that would really mean.

First, you have to remember why you ever moved away from home in the first place.

Sure, it was nice to have a roof over your head, and three squares a day, and mom doing the ironing and cleaning. Sometimes, if you caught him in a good mood, you could hit up the old man for an extra twenty to put some gas in the tank. Yeah, life was sweet: you knew that all your needs would be taken care of by good old mom and dad. So why did you ever leave?

Ah, now it's coming back to you...remember how mom insisted you come home by midnight...all that nagging about cleaning up your room...dad giving you those lectures and saying things like "As long as you're living in my house you'll live by my rules"...how your parents were always interfering with your personal life...how tired you got of always having to tell them where you were going and when you would be home...remember how much you looked forward to moving out someday and becoming INDEPENDENT?

Yes, dear lefty friends, that is what you have forgotten: your desire for independence. And that independence is what you are getting ready to sacrifice to the Nanny State that you are so intent on creating in the USA.

In the liberal mind, the answer to every problem known to man is the same: more government control. Trouble with the car companies? Let the government take them over. Instability in the financial markets? We need the government to take over banks and insurance companies. Health care costs getting out of control? Natch, we need socialized medicine.

Whatever the problem, the solution is more government.

As we continue to turn over more decision making to an ever-growing federal bureaucracy, we incrementally give more control over our lives to Big Brother. One day we will wake up and wonder why we aren't free anymore.

The plain fact is that we cannot live as free and independent citizens if we refuse to accept the responsibility for taking care of ourselves. Whoever is taking care of you is going to have the ability to tell you what to do. Whether it is your parents, or the government, whoever is paying the bills gets to make the rules.

One obvious difference is, at least our parents actually cared about us, and they were taking care of us with their own money. When the government is in charge of our lives, not only does it NOT love us, it takes away our own money so that it can pay our bills and tell us what to do. We will, in effect, be financing our own servitude.

Personally, I like being independent. That's why I moved away from home. That's why I thank God every day that I live in this great republic of ours. I want my grandchildren to enjoy the same blessings of liberty that my grandparents handed down to me.

So please, don't think I'm being mean when I say, "Lefties go home!" If you want to be treated like a child, that is your business. Just leave the rest of us out of it.

Meet The Master Gardener

Being a world-class procrastinator, I didn't want to rush into planting my flowers in early May like normal Midwesterners do. But everyone else had flowers in their yard, and all I had were weedy flower beds, so I finally shamed myself into getting some yard work done.

I picked up a flat of marigolds at K-Mart, and I congratulated myself on buying them at a close-out discount. What glorious financial stewardship I can display sometimes. So why does my family just think I'm cheap?

But I digress...back to the story of planting: I realized that the flower bed, having been neglected for a season, had to be prepared before I could create my beautiful floral masterpiece. So first came the hard work (which perhaps explains my procrastination) of weeding and cultivating the soil.

I was a man with a mission, so I got down and dirty with the earth. I crawled through the flower bed, pulling weeds out by the roots, and cleared out all of the leaves, sticks and other debris that cluttered the area. Soon I was ready to cultivate.

I tore into that tough, compacted soil with my trusty Garden Claw (as seen on TV) and soon I had a flower bed worthy of the name. The soil was loose, fine, and soft down to a depth of about 6 inches. With the bed finally prepared to my satisfaction, I gently planted my flowers, carefully tamped the soil, and then spread the mulch.

After a good soaking with the sprinkler, my marigolds were ready to flourish in the home I prepared for them, and I could spend the rest of the summer enjoying their beauty. As I relaxed and surveyed the fruits of my labors, it dawned on me that there was a spiritual lesson to be found in all of this gardening. (Don't pretend like you didn't see this coming.)

If you are a Christian, and therefore a child of God, you will discover sooner rather than later that he is going to pretty regularly want to straighten you up and do new things with your life, whether you like it or not.

(Amazing as this sounds, God has never once asked for my advice about anything he wanted to do with me. Not one single time! Go figure.)

Of course, when God gets ready to plant some new refinements into your character, he is confronted with the necessity of first getting the weeds, debris and other crud in your life out of the way. You know your crud better than I do, so don't make me draw you an ugly picture.

When God begins to weed your life, it can make you pretty uncomfortable; sometimes downright irritated. Before you know it, he's poking and prodding and convicting you of various selfish behaviors that you are perfectly content to let be, thank you very much! As a final insult to your self-contentment, God has a way of sticking that flawless heavenly mirror of his right in front of your face, and forcing you to take a long hard look at yourself. This is not usually a pleasant exercise.

Being selfish, flawed creatures, we don't appreciate having our shortcomings and sinfulness sifted through by an intrusive Creator. But we had best "get over it" because God is a lot bigger than us and he will find a way to have his way.

So repent now or repent later -- God will eventually wear you down. Like they say on the TV police shows, "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way."

Then, after all of that annoying weeding, comes the cultivating. Ouch! All of a sudden God is stirring up your world in ways you never anticipated. He's shredding your pre-conceived notions, chopping up your hard-heartedness, and crumbling up your comfortable routine.

Thankfully, in due time this process is completed, and we are finally ready to receive what God has prepared for us. In place of all the debris and clutter that we had allowed to accumulate in our lives, God plants a new and beautiful direction for service that we would never have thought of for ourselves. (This should come as no surprise, him being all-knowing and us being all-ignorant.)

Now, instead of a life as useless as a weed-choked flower bed, we exude a beautiful new fragrance. We're ready to bless this world afresh, and we are able to share God's love in new and exciting ways. All of the disruption that we so wished to avoid was actually the best thing that could have happened to us.

Hmmm...all of this horticultural allegory has led me to begin pondering the pruning that I need to give my apples trees...but let's save that story for another day.