OS has promised himself to not just sit and whine, and expect to be taken seriously. He really believes we have solutions to our present challenges, if we will embrace basic wisdom, and choose leaders who possess that wisdom.
So many now in early adulthood have no memory of Ronald Reagan. Their childhoods were spent in the shadow of the sleazy Clintons and inept Bushes, in a culture in love with money and itself. They don't understand, they can't. Just like OS can't understand life under FDR. He wasn't there.
OS does remember Reagan. After the parade of LBJ's grandiosity, Nixon's paranoia, Ford's good-hearted but doomed stewardship, and Carter's ineptitude, the country was in very bad shape. OS was trying to get a career underway in the throes of a gross recession. Times were hard. Hope was a bit in short supply. He had voted for Reagan, feeling his stomach clutch with fear as he pulled the lever.
Reagan understood, and spoke the needed words at the crucial time. Short, clear, unequivocal, wise, optimistic, visionary, and true; all guaranteed to make him the target of the vitriol of the Left.
Just a few phrases--do they not ring true today? Do you understand why so many search for another Reagan? Does the outpouring of admiration and throngs of crowds at his death now make more sense, after years of Clintons, Bushes, and now Obama?
The business of our nation goes forward.
These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people. Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery and personal indignity.
Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity. But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.
You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why then should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?
We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding -- we’re going to begin to act beginning today. The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
And, later:
We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.
It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the states or to the people.
All of us -- all of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the states; the states created the Federal Government.
So, here we are again, with the lessons of Reagan forgotten, wondering why we arrived at this mess.
OS hopes some young moms and dads, born too late to remember The Gipper, will take the time to learn of him, and tell their children.
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