Posted by
KsReaganite on Thursday, December 21, 2006 3:57:17 PM
Well, seems North Carolina’s John Edwards is back again in his search for an address on Pennsylvania Avenue. The rest of us are destined to hear
ad nauseum that two America theory. Well, I have my own two America theory, one that makes more sense than the class warfare agenda rhetoric spewed by the multi millionaire trial lawyer.
There are perhaps two Americas, though divided along far more real lines than the make believe boundaries conjured up by the Edwards campaign hacks. You find there two Americas in almost every neighborhood, every state, and every income level: an America that is strong, silent, and decent and another America that is loud and lost.
There is that America where people are strong enough to resist the temptations of a corrosive culture that blares at them from televisions, commercials, and swanky workplaces. This is the America that does not fall prey to therapists who want to excise out the conscience or to the lawyers who encourage misconduct to make a quick buck. This is the America that takes its promises seriously, discharges its obligations without excuses, and teaches it offspring to do the same by example. In this America, you will find parents who sacrifice personal fulfillment and cheerfully suffer inconveniences so that their children have a safe, stable, wholesome environment to grow up in. These are not the parents who buy into the narcissistic idea that as long as Mommy/Daddy is happy, baby is automatically happy. These are the men and women who expect the best of their children and thus, with a heavy heart, discipline them and set strict boundaries and lofty expectations. This America takes responsibility for its actions instead of blaming the neighborhood, the immigrant, or the mainstream culture. In this America, God and Country, Faith and Fidelity, Honor and Family are not dirty words. Here the ethical lapses of friends, family, and neighbors are understood with love, corrected with candor, but never excused away with a wink and a nod. This is the America that takes its ethical guidance from its conscience, its founding Creeds, and its God, not from the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association or the ACLU. This is the America I to which I belong.
Then there is an America that funds John Edwards and John Kerry, Rudy Giuliani and Ted Kennedy, Kathleen Sebelius and Claire McCaskill. This is the America where the concepts of right and wrong are derived from Hollywood, arbitrated at country club ladies luncheons, and explained away under a cloak of false indignation. Here parents have therapists to assure them that conscience is an obstacle to be removed on the way to personal hedonism, and that children’s childhoods, even their innocent little lives sometimes, are expendable in that grand endeavor. This America covers up its dark secrets by talking about the plight of the poor while making sure that the offspring of the poor never set foot in the private schools of the privileged. This America comforts its increasingly compromised conscience by sitting on nice sounding committees and boards that do little and percolating in Sunday coffee klatches that were once houses of worship. These are men and women who feign horror at hearing ethnic epithets but chuckle and joke about infidelity, dishonesty, and hurting children. Every value, every ethic, every moral absolute is negotiable in this America for here the Ten Commandments are merely, if anything, the Ten Very Old Suggestions. This America has long lost the endowment of goodness that was bestowed on it by its Founders.
Those, then, are the two Americas in the United States. From where I sit, John Edwards belongs to a different America than I do for sure.