Are we fighting a losing battle?

I came to DC almost 7 months ago. Sometimes it feels like an eternity. Sometimes it feels like I’m still not really here… like I’m just visiting a place I never really wanted to be in the first place. I hate Washington, DC and what it represents. I walked through this city as a tourist and was stunned by the beauty of it. The history, the buildings, the architecture, the pristine lawns and the monuments. It’s like no other city in the country. The longer I spend here, the more I loathe the underbelly of what it has become.

We used to stand for freeom. We were founded by a group of people who went to great lengths to fight and die for not only their liberty, but for ours. They fought tyranny and won. Here we are 233 years later, and our President has just signed legislation that takes us one very large step back toward the kind of nation that we left. Many see this as a good thing. Most don’t.

Freedom has never meant comfort. In fact, it usually comes to mean just the opposite. It means being willing to sacrafice the handouts and the “comfort” at the hands of one who would seek to control you. It means that sometimes you’re probably going to not get the things you need until you can afford them. It’s going to be inconvenient.: The nature of freedom is not necessarily prosperity. Sometimes, it means the freedom to fail. It means having the opportunity to hit bottom, and the opportunity to pick yourself back up and come back stronger. It means starting over sometimes.

With the passage of this health care legislation, we’ve created yet another entitlement in our country. Entitlements are impossible to remove once they are in place – the Democratic party has been buying chunks of the electorate for decades. We are at a point now where more than half the country is receiving more from the government than they contribute. It was Maggie Thatcher who famously said “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”. We’re well on our way.

Here’s the issue with this health care legislation – it’s not about health care. It never was. It was about sugarcoating an idea that has effectively forced even more Americans to rely on the government for their well being. This is another block of people who will not vote against the Democratic party. Not to be hyperbolic, but if the majority of the country becomes dependent on the government, then is freedom no longer valued? Is it even possible to elect people who represent limited government when that’s not what the majority of the people want anymore?

More simply, is the Republic dead?

I don’t have an answer. But I do know that the uprising of the past year and a half, along with the backlash from this health care reform that was jammed down our throats, has shown me that there are millions of Americans who value their freedom more than they value the false sense of security from the government. For that, I am grateful. Seeing tens of thousands of people show up again and again to fight back gives me hope, and I’m not willing to go down without a fight. This is still America, and we are still a nation that values liberty above all else. We were founded by people who were willing to fight to the death over tax increases. That spirit : is alive and well in many today, and from that, my hope is that a revolution occurs. We’ll come back stronger.

And we’ll come back free.

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