Posted on 07/06/2012 10:48:51 AM PDT by Jeanette Pryor
“It’s not that liberals are ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Day one- Check out An American Life by Ronald Reagan from the library.
I started reading this last year, but had to stop when school started and I was too busy memorizing all the states in China for Geography 101. That was useful…but then again, you never know. I may be shipped there to work in a Gulag and, being an American, I can work my way up and start a business as a tour guide. It might come in handy to know those states after all.
I was fourteen when Ronald Reagan was elected president. Even to a shallow child, the change in the mood of the country was palpable, grown-ups didn’t seem so down. Long before Reagan’s policies helped change the economic conditions, he induced a deep sense of optimism, of confidence.
Reagan did not, of course, ”invent” the principles thanks to which America became America, but he was deeply convinced that, if we retired “those who knew so much that isn’t so,” those old American core principles would result, as they always have, as they always necessarily will, in the restoration of the American way of life.
We can’t write well until we think well. Reagan thought well and so he was happy. He was happy, so he wrote and spoke well. He spoke from a fundamental place of joy. Reagan was also kind. Having changed his own ideas about government and how men and women ought to live in society, he respected his listeners enough to reason with them. And he knew well that we think better together when we first laugh together because laughter can build a bridge. He often found his way into the minds of his opponents because he shared a moment of joy, of laughter. You don’t laugh with enemies. Ronald’s enemies were false ideas, not the people who knew so many of them.
As speech writers, we can’t fake Ronald’s humor, we have to share his ideas, American ideas first. The right thinking about America comes first, then the joy.
Great thread, and an apt and timely lesson.
Me, too.
Happy Birthday, Mrs. Reagan.
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