A Troubled World

A very good friend of mine wrote me this week to tell me how bad the news media exacerbates everything. He said he was just tired of all the complaining in general and that it weighs heavily on his mind. He felt that all the troubles of the world were being jammed down his throat. He constantly was hearing how bad the economy was, how bad the weather was, the gas prices, the health care debacle, problems in Africa, Iran, North Korea, our national debt and how China was going to own us. He said he was getting old and did not need to carry the problems of the world too. He asked whatever happened to the Grandfather who could just sit on the bench with the children and tell stories about the good old days and the children listened because the stories were interesting?

I said to him that I agreed with him in principal and wouldn't it be wonderful to sit back on the porch and tell our children and grandchildren that everything is beautiful and they do not have a care in the world. Yes, that would be nice but not reality. I told him that in fact, when we were kids, we listened to the radio and to the conversations of our Mom and Dad. The world was dangerous then and the United States was trying to deal with World War II and the likes of Adolf Hitler, a man who wanted to fly the Nazi flag over the entire world. When I sat down with my children, we were in Viet-Nam trying to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia and the threat of the Communist Soviet Union who threatened to destroy us. Today we are dealing with Iran, North Korean, nuclear proliferation and a radical Muslim religion which wants to destroy Christianity and the Non-Muslim countries. On top of that, we have elected a President who has shown very liberal tendencies and his administration seems to have their image of what our country should be like rather than what our Constitution has created over the past two hundred years.

My point is that we will always have these threats to our nation and to the world. We can ignore them and bury our head in the ground or we can talk about them, write about them and collectively raise our voices as we did this past midterm elections. I remember many years ago when joining the military that I would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The day that we as a nation no longer believe those words is when we forfeit our rights to exist as the United States of America.