They Deserve Better Than This

“Carol, can I ask you something?” my Dad asked at lunch today.

“Sure, Dad.” I answered.

“What is happening to my country?”

So much has changed since January 20, 2009. In just four months we’ve seen massive deficit spending, the government takeover of private industries and the once free press become an extension of the White House. Through all of it my context has been my grandchildren. After all, at five and eight years old, it is their future that is being effected the most and long after I am gone they will be left with the problems we are creating today. I imagine that the social engineers leading this charge believe that my grandchildren will simply accept their fate because it will be all they know. If ten years from now the government “officially” takes over the media, will my grandson react as I have to the government takeover of the auto industry? Not likely.

To be certain, my father loves his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and he worries what the future will bring them. Talking to him today, I believe he is mourning the loss of his past. He was born in 1928, at the end of the Greatest Generation. He came up in the world believing that individual liberty and freedom was everything and that with hard work a man could achieve anything. He didn’t need books to learn about the pain of The Depression or the horrors of World War II. He lived through those times. My father knows that Europeans live free because Americans crossed the ocean and died for their freedom. My father knows that this country became prosperous because its citizens were willing to take risks. My father knows that people throughout the world have had their lives improved immeasurably by the hard work of the citizens of the United States of America.

I struggled to answer my father. How can I, who benefited from his generation’s sacrifice, explain this to him? He can’t fathom that his President would apologize for the greatness of his country. He can’t understand that hard work has become punishable. The last four months have gone against everything he’s held true his entire life.

“Is it too late, Carol?”

“No, Dad. Not yet.”