Our mission is to reawaken the Genuine American Spirit of living in a good, great, and growing nation as free individuals.
Remembering What Made Us Good
Barry MacDonald — Editorial
Please look above and read the mission statement of The St. Croix Review. Usually it is presented in a shorter version: Our mission is to reawaken the Genuine American Spirit. . . .
Progressives would read the above sentence and scoff, or become sarcastic and scornful. Let them. We have work to do — to assert ourselves productively.
The Left has taken over our education system. After the Parkland shooting in Florida, how did the students so quickly organize themselves into a protest movement with a narrow focus on gun control? See the encouragement teachers and administrators gave them, allowing them a day off from schoolwork to mount a ’60s style march. Notice the full-time attention the news media gave the students. The students are children. It appears they have been trained beforehand to think and behave in a scripted direction.
Thinking gun control is the only solution to school shootings is like looking at the problem through a straw.
Suzanne Venker, of the Fox News Channel, presented a wonderful report “Missing Fathers and America’s Broken Boys — the Vast Majority of Mass Shooters Come From Broken Homes.” She based her report on a study published by Family Studies on Dec. 16, 2013, titled “Sons of Divorce, School Shooters.”
Suzanne writes that boys and girls react differently to the dissolution of their families, with girls being more likely to hurt themselves or behave promiscuously. But the girls do have the more frequent advantage of staying with mothers, while the boys are often separated from their fathers. Suzanne makes the point that boys need their fathers for nurturance and role models.
In America today, fatherhood is neglected and pundits use the term “toxic masculinity” to scorn and condemn men.
Divorce is commonplace. The ideal of a mother, and father, each of whom has an irreplaceable role in raising children, is devalued.
Apart from the few boys who become shooters, who can guess how many boys are harmed because they don’t learn healthy masculinity from their fathers? How do we promote the importance of fatherhood? Perhaps we should begin talking about the importance of fatherhood.
America is suffering because we have absorbed too many toxic progressive falsehoods. One of the most pernicious narratives is that a prosperous American economy is poisoning the earth. It speaks well of Americans that we want our economy to be as harmless as possible, and it should be noted that American emissions of CO2 have been declining year after year — more greatly than many signatories of the Paris Accord. Americans are big-hearted people and we want to live in a clean environment.
Yet Leftist politicians and intellectuals have implanted the idea that broad-based prosperity and growth is self-centered and evil. We are told that the “profit motive” is evil. We are being directed to aim for a “sustainable” economy instead of a growing economy. We are being regulated to death under the assumption that free enterprise is destructive. We are advised that living in single-family homes in the suburbs is selfish, as we are creating “sprawl.” Instead, we are told, we should be renting high-rise apartments in large cities. And it would be nice if we gave up our cars and took a train to the office.
Modern life has become difficult because the costs of higher education, housing, and healthcare are rising dramatically, while wages have stagnated or declined. Blue-collar men are losing jobs to technical innovation and are facing daunting and dispiriting challenges. The middle class is shrinking and the working class is struggling to survive.
College students are graduating with burdensome debt; they can’t find well-paying jobs, and often they settle for part-time work. Many graduates are living with their parents instead of getting married, buying homes, and starting families. And conditions are even worse for high school graduates, as their jobs are taken by frustrated college graduates.
America must be allowed to grow again. We must not heed the Leftist pressure to limit our economy. We must break the unaccountable power of bureaucrats who are strangling free enterprise. Any politician who speaks of sustainability in preference to growth should be voted out of office.
Donald Trump is absolutely correct in wanting to “make America great again.” It is remarkable how such a simple, laudable, statement sets him apart from every other politician. Any American politician who wants a hobbled America should be ashamed of her- or himself.
We must have faith that the return of broad-based prosperity, that promotes upward mobility again, will lift America up and out of the doldrums — and many of our social pathologies will dissipate.
And we should notice that the billionaires and millionaires (Tom Steyer, Leo DiCaprio, and Al Gore) who say that Americans should settle for humble circumstances, have no intention of living humbly themselves — they are already living large.
This latest $1.3 trillion spending bill, which the President mistakenly signed, takes as much money from the American people as President Obama took when the Democrats controlled the House. Shame on the Congress and President Trump! The President should have vetoed the bill.
The Republican leadership played the same trick the Democrats got away with: dumping a 2,200-page bill at the last minute, and leaving no time for the public to discover what’s in it. Who knows how many secret payoffs are in it?
Every dollar seized by a crony is unavailable to an entrepreneur who could have used it to create wealth. Every dollar borrowed and spent today is an extra burden of debt heaped on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren. How can people in the middle and lower classes become upwardly mobile if the seed money they need is given to cronies? This is the first time in American history when the young face a diminished future because their parents have been dissolute.
Our mission statement asserts that we are a “good” and “great” nation. “Good” comes before “great.” Napoleon Bonaparte was great, but was he good? We could have a lively debate about the supposed “good” he did.
America is a great nation. Among other things, we put astronauts on the moon. But more importantly the American people are good people, because our freedoms allow us to blossom into enterprise and independence, which, in turn, affords us the opportunity to be compassionate.
We are also good because of our religious faith. We know that are born not only for ourselves, but also for the benefit of our families and communities. We were not born to be selfish.
We should remember what makes us good. And we should remove every selfish politician. Republicans need to primary out a good number elected Republicans. *
