America In The Mirror

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” Declaration of Independence

On the surface, this year’s 4th of July celebration was like the many that preceded it. My son, having infinitely more patience and mechanical sense than I ever had, oversaw the assembly of a new charcoal grill. Burgers, chip, drinks, laughter, conversation, and even a performance by Victor Borge on a DVD underscored a 4th of July at the Carter house. We celebrated family, our country, and the men and women that have stood between us and freedom’s enemies abroad.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece where I wished everyone a happy “Independence Day” in recognition of what we are celebrating. I make no such suggestion this year. America could use a good long look in the mirror.

Thomas Jefferson said, “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition.” There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes the federal government to seize control of private businesses, but it has done exactly that. The president now controls car companies and even fires a private CEO at his whim. The government oversees executive salaries and aspires through impending legislation to control virtually every aspect of your life.

Despite the promise from our new president to post a bill online for a period of 7 or 8 days before taking action on it, bills are rushed to a vote and signature in hours, not days. James Madison said that, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” And so the modern day Statists’ is in a panicked rush to pass measure after measure that tramples on the very liberties that brave men and women have fought and died to preserve.

Just recently, the President announced his intent to mandate what type of light bulb we will be allowed to use. Home loans will be made more available depending on where you wish to live. In a rare moment of candor on his health care plan, President Obama even said that it may be time to tell granny that it would be better to forgo the surgery she needs and just take pain medicine. Thus does the government presume to tell us how to live, where to live and even if we can live. And we think of ourselves as free?

The philosopher Mortimer Adler said that, “Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.” Does anyone believe that we are so emancipated today? The late actor Jimmy Durante boiled it down to this: “Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?” The answer to Jimmy’s question is found in man’s own history. The natural condition of mankind, according to our Founding Fathers, is freedom. But the historical condition of mankind has been one of tyranny and servitude. From the kings and pharaohs of ancient times to the Marxist, fascist and socialist experiments of recent generations, man’s history is replete with the desire of some men to lord over the affairs of others.

You see, the “change” the statist promises is not new and certainly not real change. It’s the tired old promise that if you just surrender more of your property, more of your time, more of your earnings, more of yourself to the state, you will be taken care of, and we’ll all be happily transported to a utopian paradise that has never existed and runs contrary to the very nature of man.

And so we have a situation in which the President flies his wife to New York City for a date at taxpayer’s expense, enjoys $100 a pound beef at the White House, throws a Hawaiian themed party for Congress on the White House grounds that featured (I’m not making is up) huge amounts of pork, flies across the country to sign a stimulus bill that so far has stimulated the unemployment rate all the way up to 9.5%, and then tells us what kind of light bulbs we can use! That’s not the audacity of hope. That’s the audacity of arrogance! Our elected officials castigate private executives for flying on private jets at private expense, all while flying all over the world on junkets at public expense. The ruling elite live the lives of potentates while putting their feet on the very throat of the private sector, and we call this change? Hope? What a load of crap!

Folks, any government that can reach into your toilet and your light socket has got you by the proverbial whatchamacallits. You can call it a lot of names, but freedom isn’t one of them. Independence was a good idea, but it no longer applies. The state has grown so powerful, so arrogant, that it is out of control. Just look at it’s enforcement arm. There are some brave and selfless law enforcement officers out there, but have you seen the videos? People beaten, tased, and arrested for nothing more than verbally challenging an officer? Here in Bay County, where many officers wouldn’t know what probable cause was if it did a lap dance for them, a young man in obvious physical distress was beaten, kicked, and died at the hands of local law enforcement officers. Show them a copy of the Constitution and they will spit tobacco juice and tell you they don’t care about that around here. AND THEY GET AWAY WITH IT!! The Constitution is null and void, its limitations on government ignored by the very people who took
oaths to defend it. The saddest fact is that we have the very best of us overseas, fighting and dying for something that doesn’t even exist back home.

All of these thoughts and more weighed on me as I went downtown for the annual fireworks display in Panama City. An investment of over $50,000 had been made in this years display, making it the largest on record in this part of the state. As the crowd joined in the countdown, I could feel the excitement build. Five, four, three, two, one…and a jarring boom sounded from two barges in the bay as the pyrotechnics rocketed upward. Then, simultaneous bursts of color lit the night as the concussion of blasts seemed to kick us in the chest.

For the next 20 minutes, we were treated to the best of American music and enough bombs, cascades of light, and brilliant explosions of color to make even a die-hard KISS fan like me happy. Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” played and I remembered the brave people I had the pleasure to serve with for 20 years in uniform. Then, when John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” began playing, the volleys of fireworks reached a crescendo. These were punctuated at first by the bright explosion of concussion bombs in the sky. Soon, the punctuation turned into a relentless assault of concussion. I recalled the relentless and withering attacks our military deals to any foreign aggressor who dares to assault our country, our people, and our freedom. The colors and sounds that split the night recalled the audacity of our Founders who stood up to tyranny and declared that this would be a free nation. A nation where government would be restrained by force of law from any function that did not directly protect the liberty of the individual. These were the real community organizers, people whose beliefs and doctrines stemmed more from Christianity than from Karl Marx.

Much has been damaged in America. Much has been destroyed. But are we finished? Can freedom make a comeback? Every day that our service people don the uniform, they answer in the affirmative. They don’t quit, ever. Neither should we. Speak up. Contact your representatives. Remind them that they work for us, not the other way around. WE own this place!! Not the pin-heads in Washington and not tobacco spitting bullies with badges. WE THE PEOPLE own this country! Freedom is not negotiable. It is not for sale, in return for a cradle to grave nanny state. It is not a favor occasionally granted by the government. It is our birthright, given to us by God. Seize it back!! If we can’t do that, then lower the flag, call it a day, and as Samuel Adams said, “Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

With a Twinkle In His Eye

My Grandfather. D.P. Carter, is ailing. Cancer is running it’s insidious course through his body. My company was able to get me through my home town so I could spend some time with him today. I knew he was frail, but I wasn't quite ready for what I saw. He has such a strong mind and determined spirit. The man is a fighter par excellence, yet his body is letting him down. He was sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed, because he didn’t want me to see him in that bed when I came in. He looked shrunken,..frail,...and tired. From a distance, he almost looked “hollow-eyed,“ but those eyes burned bright when I walked up to him. The first thing he noticed was a my bald head. "Where did your hair go, boy?" I told him I gave it the day off. He laughed. He wanted to go in the living room where we could talk. So the hospice nurse, a dear soul named Lou, got him in his wheelchair and in the living room we went.

Grandpa is in a sort of fog right now. He has a tough time connecting thoughts, remembering things he's already said, heard, or seen. The conversation was disjointed at first, so I thought we'd go back down memory lane instead. That got him alert. I asked him about the time, when he was a little boy, when he waited until his dad was taking a nap, and then dipped his dad's hand in chicken poop before taking a feather and tickling his dad’s nose with it. Grandpa laughed and said, 'He rubbed that shit all over his face." He added, "I got my ass beat, but it was worth it." And then we were off to the races, talking about old times. He told me the story of when Lake Charles High was playing a football game back in the 50s. He and my Uncle Lester got drunk and marched on the field with the band at half time. Or the time they faked press credentials and got into the press box during a LCHS away game. Then there was the story about him and Grandma, Lester and Aunt Lou, going to Beaumont and “honky tonkin.” They came back home and one of Grandma's sisters was there waiting. Grandma's sister, Edna, was a teetotaler and believed alcohol was evil. Grandpa said, "I tried to act sober, but Lester was passed out. Edna was standing there watching. I opened the door and Lester just rolled out onto the ground." He started laughing and I said, "And you caught hell?" "You got that right boy!" It was priceless.

I picked up a little book that he wrote a few years ago. It's a book about his life. My favorite passage is the one where he met my Grandma Carter many years ago in Church Point, LA. He described her as, "...the cutest little coonass I had ever seen." He goes on in the book to point out that he was a truck driver, delivering beer for JAX Brewery out of New Orleans. This didn't endear him to Grandma's father who, Paw Paw tells us as an aside, was a Presbyterian minister. Again, priceless stuff.

A few years ago, Grandpa was in a nasty head on collision in town. He ended up in hospital busted up pretty badly. He told me the story about how the docs said that he had actually died that day and they brought him back. In the middle of the story, he forgot what he was saying and went back to the beginning of the story and started telling it to me all over again, unaware that he had just told me the story. I smiled and listened because I don’t want him to stop telling me stories,…ever. He repeated himself yet again, and on the third round I figured I should verbally do the equivalent of bumping the needle when a record gets stuck. So I interrupted him and said, "I know how the docs brought you back." "You do?" he asked. "Yep," I said. He replied "Well they manipulated my pace maker." I said, "Nope, that's not how they did it." He leaned in, looked at me intently and said, "Well then, how did they bring me back?" I answered "Gumbo." "Huh?" "They brought you a bowl of gumbo and you came back!" He looked at me for a moment, and then said, "You're full of shit, ya know that?" I said, "Yes sir. Look who I got it from." He started laughing and we were off again.

He asked my Aunt Rosalie to go get his big Bible. He asked if I had time to listen to him tell me about the family. I said of course, and that I wanted to pass all that information down to my kids. “Oh, please do,“ he said. Aunt Rosalie brought his Bible and there in the front, years ago he had written the names of his brothers and sisters along with their dates of birth and death. He told me about his parents and siblings. He is the last surviving member of that family. His parents were share croppers. Dirt poor. He was one of 12 children, only 8 of whom survived. They lived a hard, hard life. In his book, Grandpa wrote, “To be honest, we were so poor, that the poor people called us poor.” Describing one house the family lived in, he writes:

“It was a big old house, with a chimney at each end of the the house, the kitchen was separated from the house with a little walkway connecting the two together. There were cracks in the floor, and you could see the ground underneath, so just swept the trash through the cracks. The house was three or four feet above the ground. There were cracks in the wall, and there were no glass windows. The windows had wooden shutters and when you opened them, there was the wide open space outside.”

Grandpa goes on to tell us that the reason why there were high poster beds back then was so mosquito bars could be hung on them. That way the family could sleep without being eaten alive by the bugs. But despite all the hardship, the overall impression Grandpa leaves in his writing is of a happy family. Hard working, but happy. He has always been the most naturally jovial person I've ever known.

After about an hour of visiting, including a walk down the driveway and back, he was tired. We got him into the hospital bed, and he was asleep before he ever hit the pillow. The hospice nurse looked at me and said, "He's a special man." "Yes ma'am," I answered, "From the time I was this high (gesturing with my hand close the floor), I always looked forward to visiting Paw Paw Carter. I knew there would be jokes, smiles, and lots of laughter." Lou told me that even when he is in pain, he makes jokes with her. I’m not surprised. It seems to go with the territory in this family.

I don't know that Grandpa will be with us much longer. His 93rd birthday is next month and something in my gut tells me he may not live to see it. The laughter is still there. The quick wit and humor is still there. But his body is fighting him, and he is tired. Tired and frustrated that he can't will his body to keep up with his soul. When he goes, the world will smile a little less. When that bright light of his moves on, things will darken a bit for the rest of us. But in a way, he's spent a lifetime teaching us by example not to take ourselves, or life itself, too seriously. I've heard it said that one of the ways you measure success is not by the stuff you accumulate, or even the titles you earn. It's the smiles you leave behind that show your measure. If that's true, and I suspect it is, my Grandfather is a giant of a man. Our loss will be Heaven's gain.