My wife, our my three kids, and I are vacationing this week in Washington DC, and as I walked around town taking pictures, random thoughts popped into my head. Here are some of them:
- Ray LaHood is not a very impressive guy. LaHood is currently the Secretary of Transportation, and he has the distinction of being a Republican in Obama's cabinet and a former teacher. His evaluation of Obama sounds like he has been drinking the coolaid over at the White House- he said Obama was bipartisan, open-minded, willing to listen to anyone, etc, and I don't see that at all. About the only right thing LaHood said was when I asked him whether it was tougher being a teacher or a cabinet member, and he said it was tougher being a teacher- I agree with him on that. I mean, how hard is it just to throw a billion dollars at something, and that's how the Obama White House runs.
- Washington DC is booming. I think it is one of the few states in the nation to actually have increasingly employment, job growth, and GDP growth. There are signs everywhere of prosperity and building- roads are being repaired, monuments are being revamped, buildings are adding on, and fresh paint and plaster is in abundance. On a guidebook of DC I read that our capitol was designed to look like the capitols of the Emperors and despots of Europe, but it was okay because we lived in a free nation that celebrated liberty and property. Well, as our country becomes more despotic and tyrannical, it is going to look increasingly like those capitols of the old days, when the Emperor took money from the countryside to build himself new statues and bigger palaces.
- My camera filled up, so I wasn't able to get a picture of this, but when my wife and I walked to see the White House, we saw a rainbow. It was kind of sunny but raining, and the rainbow was gorgeous. It began at the Washington Monument, soared into the sky, and set on the Ronald Reagan building. I wasn't going to read anything into that, except that after we saw the White House and walked away from it, we turned and looked back, and the rainbow was gone, but you could see the Washington Monument behind the White House, and the water coming off the top if it had darkened the tip, and it looked like the Monument was crying. I thought to myself- 'what would George Washington think about the guy currently occupying the White House?' There is no way of knowing, but I think I could guess that he would not think favorably of Obama.
- In the Rotunda of the National Archives, next to the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence, there is a display set up on how our American freedom documents have inspired other nations around the world. On it, there is this line from George Washington's inaugural address:
"the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people"
This line makes me wonder if the sacred fire of liberty is still burning. Have we lost it- in a short-sighted grab for the comforts of tyranny have we extinguished it? And what happens if America turns it back on liberty, property, and life? Will it begin to fade in the world? Have we as humans blown our one and best chance at truly building a free republic based on natural rights and core principles? - Last thought of the day, and it comes after reading Lincoln's second inaugural address at the Lincoln Memorial (Incidentally, whatever happened to great inaugural addresses? Can you recite or remember a single thing from Obama's 'historic' one?). I'm not going to rewrite it or copy it here, although short, you've read enough today. Read it sometime here. There were two messages that I took from it. First, it was the sense of being right- Lincoln knew that the North was right, and that is why it was victorious. We are right on Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other issues, and there is no need to apologize for it- they pray to their gods, we pray to ours, and we emerge victorious- in his infinite wisdom, God knows what he is doing. The other thing that I took from Lincoln's address was the willingness to pay the price. The Civil War was terrible, but if that is what it took to right the wrongs of slavery, so be it. In our society, we are not willing to pay a price for anything- we want everything free and given to us. The financial industry paid the price for bad loans and risky practices- and we bailed them out. The auto companies paid the price for building bad cars- and we bailed the out. Many people pay the price for not getting health insurance- and now we want to bail them out. There is a price for everything, and we need to be able to pay that price again.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar