There ought to be a word for it. Perhaps there is and we are unaware? That excruciating instant during a hangover when the fog has lifted just enough that for the first time, and with stomach-lurching clarity, one appreciates the full folly and recklessness of the previous evening’s activities.We suspect, and indeed hope, that September 11, 2009 proves just such a moment for the citizens of the United States.
America’s hangover from its binging on Leftism began, it would seem, mid-summer as the Obama administration and its obedient Congress vowed to force their health care proposals down the throats of the people, immediately following prodigious tankard-loads of “Stimulus” and Cap and Trade.
At that point, even the celebrated independents and moderates (i.e. those who normally don’t give a monkey’s about politics, history, or current affairs) became aware of a nauseating churn in their bellies and a painful ringing in their ears. They too had had enough. Many are beginning to realize the very real threat to their liberty the aforementioned measures constitute, and are fueled by a palpable sense that, once lost, that liberty shall never be regained.
This is all quite positive. And yet, we remain uneasy. For the Last Best Hope of Mankind had another such awakening just eight short years ago, far more violent and acute than this. For many, September 11, 2001 was electro-shock therapy, jolting them out of the delusion that America was inevitable, untouchable, and indestructible. They began, as had their forefathers, to guard their liberty jealously and hold the principles upon which their great nation was founded with reverence.
For too many others, it would seem, the single most horrific attack on the American homeland was just another tragedy, like a hurricane or an auto pileup, to be cleaned-up , litigated, and forgotten.
Now, as the stench of insidious, demoralizing, enervating collectivism rises throughout the fruited plain, the citizenry is again reacting with a kind of instinctual rebellion and righteous anger against the enemy – this one domestic rather than foreign.
Will this rebellion last? Will it hold? Will it be sufficient to concretize once and for all the revolutionary vision of the Founders – itself the culmination of centuries’ cultivation of the concept of ordered Liberty – in the hearts and minds of all Americans?
Not likely. Perhaps it shouldn’t. Perhaps mankind’s ceaseless flirtation with self-enslavement is more a spiritual dynamic than political, to be conquered by each individual soul for its own reasons and in its own way.
But we can dream can’t we? As Britain, Europe, and the majority of the world order yet another round at the bar of collectivist statism, it would be some measure of hope to know the United States remains out there somewhere, sober and shrewd, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Cheers,
Charlie
