It was written by RedStater, in response to this question:
Where's everyone been since Waco? Or, heck, Ruby Ridge?
RedStater:
I'll tell you where. Just trying to go about their lives putting bread on the table with as little government intrusion as possible, with increasing difficulty.
Many of us remember a time when a President who lied about a third rate bungled burglary of a hotel room led to his resignation in disgrace. That was 39 years ago. Something happened between 1974 and 1994, when we had a President who made a mockery of the office and stained it (literally, scattering bits of his DNA all over the Oval Office carpet) turning it into little more than his own private bordello. We had an Arkansas rube who used the presidency as a chick magnet. Unlike 20 years prior, when we turned out a president for impropriety and lying about it, we looked at the Clinton desecration of the office, rubbed our eyes, farted, and rolled over and went back to sleep. Unlike the 70s, the 90s economy was booming, we were getting what we wanted, and the cultural rot seemed a small price to pay for many of us who never wanted the good times to end.
For some of us, though, it was a revolting turn of events, having to figure out how to answer our eight year old daughters the question "dad, what's oral sex?" as we sat watching the evening news. We tried to sound the alarm that our culture was taking a quantum leap into the gutter, that the relationship between citizen and government was rapidly being stood on its head and that this was not OK. Along came Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elian Gonzales, the first WTC bombing. Still we slept, drunk with the new prosperity and marveling at our sophistication as we entered the new Digital Age.
We were getting cell phones, PCs, the Internet! We could go to chat rooms and talk to anyone anywhere! We could buy products online! We could all become recording artists, film makers, photographers, journalists and authors because we had the World Wide Web! We could be day traders without getting out of our pajamas! The Web was the Wild West, a new frontier, and the land rush was on. We became ever more self focused as the internet made the promotion of self not only possible, but a national addiction. It was the modern version of Indians trading away their heritage for blankets and beads.
But while we were focused on technology and how we could use all the new gizmos coming out every week to our advantage, we forgot about the growing leviathan that was spreading like a cancer into every area of our lives. And like the proverbial frog in the waterpot, yesterday's unthinkable becomes today's not so bad and tomorrow's new normal.
Starting in 2000, we were lulled even more by the false security of having a Republican administration that we trusted to keep government in check. After all, didn't they run on a platform of limited government and individual freedom? But then 9-11 happened, and our little bubble was popped for a little while. The world intruded into our party, and we reacted indignantly, as we should have. But we allowed ourselves to be used to fight a war that we should have thought harder about, but we didn't because we hadn't really been paying attention. Not really understanding how far down the bunny hole we as a culture had slipped, we got drawn into a silly "war on terror", rather than against the Islam behind it. In 1942, had Roosevelt stood up and said "the Germans are great people who are peaceful and have contributed much to the world, not all Nazis are bad, it's just a few of them who are bad apples, so we're announcing a War on Blitzkrieg!" he would have been carted off to the loony bin. But we went for it hook, line and sinker, launching on a 10- year- and- counting war against a tactic while pretending the ideology behind it is benign, costing us multi-trillions of dollar and tens of thousands of lives and making not a whit of difference in the end. To rub salt in the wound, were were convinced to give up ever more liberty and grant government previously unheard-of power through typically ironically named government programs like the Patriot Act and creation of totalitarian -sounding agencies like Department of Homeland Security. When the last Humvee rolls into the last C-5 to fly out of Kandahar, does anyone really think the country will look any different 5 minutes after we're gone than it did 10 or 20 or 100 years ago? Will our loss of freedoms have been worth it? Judging by how easy it was for two terrorists to shut down an entire metro area for a couple of days and draw every law enforcement asset in a 50 mile radius into the fray, I'd have to say I have my doubts.
Just as liberalism has grown under Republicans as much as it has under Democrats, so too Islam has grown and spread as much under our "War on terror" as it did without it. We have become hopelessly infected with liberalism, refusing to see obvious solutions to problems because of some commitment to subjective idea of ''fairness" or "social justice" or "multiculturalism." We have an immigration crisis but we won't close the border as every other country on earth does. We have turned our military into as social equality laboratory. We have a mental illness crisis in the country spawned from a society that has cut itself loose from it's moorings and we want to address the results of their illness, while ignoring the cause. We champion abortion and can't figure out why life has become valueless. We are paying 4 dollars a gallon for gasoline and willingly keep ourselves dependent on our enemies who have publicly sworn to kill us, just to convince ourselves we're ''saving the planet." We pump rot and filth into the movie theaters, living rooms and ear buds of the consumer, yet get alarmed when we see the increasing coarseness and disregard for convention growing all around us. We prop up a public school system that increasingly yields poor results, turning out dolts who cannot read, write, do simple math, and worst of all, think critically. The list of suicidal policies is long. And rather then address the problems, we clamor for more laws, and more laws, and more laws still, as if the laws themselves produced the moral desire to obey them. .
This is where everyone has been since Waco and Ruby Ridge. We're still here, but our culture has left, and we will not fix our problems until we reclaim it, no matter how many elections we win.
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