Bill Whittle’s latest at National Review Online should be required reading for everyone. The problem, my friends, is not them…it’s us. Our apathy, our lack of will, our inability to comprehend the threat that we face. The proposed bailout should shock no one…it is the direction that we’ve been heading for decades. The common man is frightened and feels that there is no turning back from the path of Socialism that we’ve been on for so long. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to have the government bailing out private industry from it’s own failures.
More and a money quote from Whittle below the fold.
The whole article should be read, but here’s the crux:
I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes –visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest. I’ve been told this story in some form or another, every day of every week of the past 30 years of my life. It wasn’t always so. But it is certainly so today. And standing against all this hypnotic power — the power of the mythmakers in Hollywood, the power of the information peddlers in the media, the corrosive power of America-hating professors on every campus in America… against all that we find an old warrior — a paladin if ever there was one — an old, beat-up warhorse standing up in defense of his city one last time. And beside him: a wonder. A common person… just a regular mom who goes to work, does a difficult job with intelligence and energy and grace and every-day competence and then puts it away to go home and have dinner with the family. Against all of that stand these two. No wonder they must be destroyed. Because — Sarah Palin especially — presents a mortal threat to these people who have determined over cocktails who the next President should be and who now clearly mean to grind into metal shards the transaxle of their credibility in order to get the result they must have. Truly, they are before our eyes destroying the machine they have built in order to get their victory. What the hell is so threatening to be worth that? Only this: the living proof that they are not needed. Not needed to govern, not needed to influence and guide, not needed to lecture us on our intellectual and moral failings which are visible only from the heights of Manhattan skyscrapers or the palaces up on Mulholland Drive. Not needed. We can do it — and do it better — without all of them.When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered; and that greatness lived in our grandparents but not our grandchildren. Yes, our betters tell us these things daily. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe it.
We must stop accepting and start acting. I am commonly criticized for being a “purist” but it is precisely the absence of purists that are leading us down this path. Every time we accept government intervention and cultural decline we are only ensuring more of the same.
Our city is not only worth defending, it absolutely must be defended.
