We live in interesting times. Amazing and remarkable things are happening in the West. Although the world around us has been changing for decades, the rate of change went exponential with the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. It’s gonna be a wild ride!
I’ve heard then Governor Ronald Reagan’s famous 1967 quote come up recently – the one about freedom never being more than one generation away from extinction. Governor Reagan was giving his inaugural address to the California State Legislature. Again, it’s from 1967 — that’s 55 years ago. It’s best read in context.
To a number of us, this is a first and hence a solemn and a momentous occasion, and yet, on the broad page of state and national history, what is taking place here is almost a commonplace routine. We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the worlds inhabitants. This continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it.
Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.
Knowing this, it’s hard to explain those among us who even today would question the people’s capacity for self- government. I’ve often wondered if they will answer, those who subscribe to that philosophy: if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
Gov. Ronald Reagan, January 5, 1967, Inaugural Address (Public Ceremony)
Truth spoken clearly for anyone to hear. If we don’t teach our children what freedom is, why it’s important, and the threats to it, we shouldn’t be surprised when they give it up. Who is teaching American children that freedom matters? Who is explaining why it’s worth fighting for? Has anyone been teaching Canadian children about the importance of rights and freedom?
I watch Russell Brand on YouTube. I like him. He’s becoming quite the political commentator. Well, “commentator” isn’t the right word. He’s becoming quite the seeker and speaker of truth. That’s really all you have to do today to gain a YUGE audience. People are thirsty for truth, but too many Western elites are actively lying and hiding the truth.
Anyway, in his latest video, Russell talks about the ability government agencies in both Canada and the US have to illegally collect and use citizens data. It’s a good video.
What I found most interesting, though, were the comments on the video. Below are a few.
“I’m Canadian and the Emergencies Act just passed. This is a dark and scary time in Canada. Never in my life did I think this would be my country. May God protect and save us! The people that are asleep are blessed for they do not know what is coming.”
“I’m a Canadian and honestly this stuff has me so nervous. I’ve never been afraid of government power in my life I never gave it that much thought but this is getting increasingly more worrisome.”
“As a Canadian I can honestly say I’m terrified of my country now. I never thought in a million years that I would be witnessing such tyranny and control here. How blind and naive we were to think these things only happened in China or other dictatorships.”
There are plenty more with the same sentiment, “I NEVER THOUGHT THIS COULD HAPPEN.”
It can happen. It IS happening right now in Canada. It happened in a smaller scale to the 1/6 protesters, too. The Canadian tyrants have already arrested a preacher and put him in solitary confinement, a type of torture if there ever was one.
The tragedy is that people thought it could never happen in the first place. How ignorant, how naive. What has happened in the past most certainly can happen again. Hell, the odds are it will. There is nothing new under the sun.
Maybe more Canadians, and Americans for that matter, will start to see the truth of another famous quote by President Ronald Reagan, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
President Reagan made that comment in 1981 during his first inaugural address as President of the USA. He was talking about the economic ills ushered in by the always attempted and always failing idea that government and central planners can manage an economy. Spoiler alert: President Reagan was pro-trucker before it was cool.
The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we’ve had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.
We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick — professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the people,” this breed called Americans.
President Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981
He who has an ear, let him hear.
How many great men are born in a generation? President Reagan and his advisors and the people around him who carried a vision of a free America filled with free people were great men. America’s Founding Fathers who wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” were great men.
Who are the great men among us now? Who will raise up the great men of future generations?
Can we wake up in time?
Unless the US does not break up on various sectarian/etc. lines, the sort of great man you reference above is likely going to look different from Reagan. He was in the right place to slow/shift various political and social forces for a time, but his skill set brought success working within the system. A great man in 15-30 years may very well be the sort who, by strength of will and good fortune, is able to salvage a regional conglomeration of states/counties/cities of like-minded individuals. A man (or group of men) able to craft some order out of chaos, a la the Wellington(s) in India and the Peninsular War or perhaps someone with the temperament of a circus ringmaster.
Egads! Here I was thinking that the writers here had their heads on straight, and I find romanticized twaddle about what great men and Americans the proto-neocons of the Reagan administration were.
Reagan himself, perhaps, was a true patriot… On some level. His legacy of gun control, however, severely weights that “perhaps” towards the negative. As evinced by the quotes here, he did at least have one hell of a speech writer.
By many accounts, after being shot, dear old Ronnie Ray-gun had a severe decline, and the ensuing years saw George H.W. Bush at the helm, as was likely intended from the first. He was a long-standing member of the power structure, from a family firmly entrenched therein… The “Swamp” did not just spring up in the past couple of decades; while it sunk to new lows and built itself to new highs in the nineties, and especially post-9/11, it had existed well before WWII, and by 1961 at least it had become vast enough to pose a sufficiently serious threat that President Eisenhower felt compelled to mention it in his farewell address. Old Shrub the Elder was kicking around doing his dirt even then, and in the eighties used his 2.75 terms to firmly set this nation on the road to hell, using dear Ronnie as a front man.
The removal of freedom has been intentionally incremental, so as not to alarm the cattle and cause a stampede; we are finally at the point where our generations will see the last facade of freedom have the supports kicked from it, to reveal the system which the oligarchs have slowly been building all this time. We *might* have a chance if we’re prepared to take our self-ownership back by the only means left us. Wistfully gazing at the gilded image of a past which never was, however, practically guarantees that, collectively, we will simply be left blinking and dazzled as the facade falls, like a nest of moles turned up by the plowman’s passage.