Since When Does Patriotism Mean Love Of Big Government?

Patriotism seems to have taken on a strange new definition. Love for country has been replaced with love for big government. At one time, American patriotism meant love for liberty, love for family, love for faith, and love for the principles articulated in America's founding documents. No more. Today, only people who demand increased government protection, increased government handouts, and increased government bureaucracies are considered patriotic.

Today's Americans look to the federal government to solve virtually every problem, to protect them from virtually any adversary, and to even subsidize their own personal welfare. In exchange for this new insatiable appetite for serfdom, such people are more than willing to surrender their individual freedoms and personal responsibilities.

There doesn't seem to be Republican alive who remembers Ronald Reagan's famous quote,

"Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem!" Instead, today's Republicans appear just as anxious to invoke the heavy hand of government as Democrats — maybe more so.

Virtually no one in Washington is calling for less government today. The only undecided question being debated now is how much to increase the size and scope of the federal government. The founders' concept of limited government has been repudiated by the vast majority of this me-first generation.

Even so-called conservative leaders (including Christian conservatives) on radio and television will fight anyone who dares suggest that the federal government has become a behemoth with virtually no resemblance to the country that was created back in 1776.

No one in Washington wants to dismantle any federal program or department. Even the once-despised National Endowment for the Arts gets a huge spending boost from these "conservative" Republicans. Ditto for federal spending for education, energy, agriculture, commerce, etc., and ad infinitum. And if you think all that's bad, wait until this new Homeland Security Department grows up. There won't be a shred of freedom left! Taxpayers have allowed themselves to be forced into financing a federal leviathan that is in the process of swallowing every liberty and personal responsibility in sight; and few people seem to mind.

Beyond that, if anyone dares suggest that the federal government is too monstrous, too oppressive, and too invasive, they are called unpatriotic. Worse still is the fact that many such people are paid personal visits from a variety of government goon squads in order to intimidate or silence them. (Yes, this practice continues under the Bush administration.)

This is not the America that tens of thousands of brave men fought and died for. This is not the country I grew up in. America has become an alien nation. It is a country completely foreign to the one bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers.

I am very confident that if George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Otis, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and the rest of those great patriots of yesteryear were alive today, they would be treated by our own government the same way they were treated by old King George of England: as traitors and criminals.

Yet, the real traitors and criminals are the ones in Washington and other places who have worked (and are working) feverishly to dismantle and destroy the fundamental principles contained in our U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence.

If despising an overbearing, overreaching, Orwellian-style federal government complete with its "swarms of officers" intent on harassing and stealing my liberties makes me unpatriotic, then I will gladly wear the moniker.

Hate to burst your bubble but "conservatives" like other conservatives before them will no doubt cave into "cultural marxism". They will compromise away their independence and ultimately their way of life.

Am so afraid you are correct, goldenboy. (You've seen this already I am sure, but others haven't...) How easy it is to accomodate until the issue is lost, as related by a German:

"THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45"
by Milton Mayer
The University of Chicago Press

From the chapter, "But then it was too late" pages 169 to 172, 1966 edition.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?---well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'

"And you ARE an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh- pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have."

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to---to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait."

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worse act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked---if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in---your nation, your people--- is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibilty even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succesion of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably everyday, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany could not have imagined."

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done, (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the University when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

"When enough of "we the people" have enought of big governement "we the people" will put an end to it."

Yeah, sure we will. When do we have enough, when they come to take our guns because of a new law making them illegal?
When they take our private property and give it to illegal immigrants for compensation because they are poor?

True, we don't have to elect the Daschels and Gebhardts, but don't you find it strange that they somehow manage to get re-elected even though everyone we know seems to dispise their politics?

Unfortunately the traitors in Washington are very well placed to impose policy, and most of them aren't even elected by the people. They have government jobs by proxy. They screen the information available to Senators and Reps because of their limited time available to completely research the consequences of legislation. Instead using the "advisors" for policy based information. Little of our real dissent towards faulty government decisions ever reaches those who actually make the decisions.

Yeah, let us wait till we are good and tired of government tyranny. Just how much more are you willing to give up before you have had enough? Better start a rock collection to throw at the enemy when you get mad enough. You won't be alone. There are plenty of sheeple who think the same way. Someone will surely do the fighting for you.

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