STORY TIME

Once upon a time, in a world far away, people were fed up with the amount of government in their lives. So they packed their possessions, and sailed across the sea—to a new world—where they could live without the tyranny they had been living under. America offered them a chance for a fresh start and a good life.

These were people who wanted to have a say in their government, and to have the freedoms that, before, they had only dreamt about. The freedom to worship as they pleased, freedom to say and write their views, freedom to elect people who would be their legislators in a congress, who would represent them and their needs. These legislators knew they could never please everyone, but they wanted to please most of them, and so they called it, “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” They wanted to form a more perfect union and realized it would never be all-perfect, but that is how a democracy works. So America, “the land of the free” was established and there were a lot of challenges over the years. A war came along that threatened to split the country in half, but finally they came to their senses, mended the rifts and carried on as the proud United States of America. Other countries threatened us, too, but we went to war to defend these freedoms, and defeated them.

Then, there were people who took those same freedoms they had been granted, and even though they were a small minority, they got their way as their lawyers litigated, what our forefathers had written, into things that were never meant to be.  Freedom of speech became the right to use profanity, tell lies and incite riots. Freedom of religion meant the one or two percent, who hated God, could get courts to chase the religious principles, that this country was founded on, out of our schools and public places. Freedom of the press meant you could peddle filth in magazines, television, movies and the internet. The right to bear arms morphed into assault rifles and guns that have no purpose but to kill another human being. We gave up on English as our official language, and told people we would teach them in whatever tongue they pleased. The door for immigration, at Ellis Island, was closed and people just snuck in any way they could. Drugs poisoned our society and sent crime rates soaring, as addicts turned to prostitution, stealing, robbing, and even killing, to feed their habits. We incarcerated more people than any country on earth, but still it grew.

The government of the people became the government of the lobbyists and special interest groups, or anyone else who had the bucks to buy political favors. Greed was rampant, and what had started out as capitalism with regulations, became true capitalism, where there are few winners because the one with the most money wins.

So in the end, the country became something it was never meant to be. It went broke over endless social programs, and useless wars, until it could no longer do business with the rest of the world. Congress became dysfunctional. The rest of the world grew increasingly wary and impatient with America, and so the country was on its own. The people looked to distant shores, like their forefathers who landed here did, but no longer was there a place to go and set up house all over again—the end.