Getting the snake off of America

A comment, left in response to School Blues by Matt Spivy at American Thinker today was very eloquent and on target:

This vignette sums up much of the political problem until now. Normal Americans tend to go along to get along in situations like the one Mr. Spivey describes. Their silence is by no means always consent, but the practical effect of such silence can often be the same as consent. Never was Burke's famous saying more a propos: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. An excessive timidity that approaches moral cowardice has long caused many Americans to keep quiet about matters that ought to have been loudly and vehemently resisted on behalf of reason and liberty. America herself now struggles to breathe and survive in the coils of the deadly ideological anaconda trying to squeeze the life out of her. This huge serpent could not wrap itself around its victim in one quick move. An insidious attack over decades has taken place. With the Obama presidency the last deadly coils are being applied to a victim only now starting to realize the mortal peril and beginning to struggle for survival. It is late, very late to commence such a resistance. In the beginning, as the first coil of the snake sought to slither around the ankle of its prey, little would have been required to brush it off. Decades of delay have changed all that. Now the serpent has wrapped itself many times around its victim, is impossible to escape by simply kicking it aside, and is constricting with all its might to weaken and finally kill its target.

The author, whose nom de plume is Teleologicus, makes the point that had we been as vigilant in keeping "progressivism" out of every institution, both public and private, at all costs, we would not be in the present danger of losing our Constitutional Republic, our freedom and our liberty. True enough, but few recognized the evil at first, and those that did were thought to be some kind of crank. (I know because I have been so accused for pointing out the end result of this or that policy.) No, instead it was "can't we just compromise on this 'reasonable' (insert law or policy here) to stop this (name the emergency here.)" After everyone got used to the new regime, then another "reasonable" law or policy was passed to solve yet another crisis that had been, as often as not, ginned up by a press eager to sell newspapers to panicked customers. That has certainly been the story with gun control. Not enough people actively resisted the gun grabbers in the beginning because they believed the press, and the initial efforts seemed "reasonable." In addition, most people genuinely believed that the government was usually benign, and that the press usually told the truth. It is only recently that a significant number of people have awakened to the fact that we have been lied to at nearly every point for our entire lives, and are still being lied to.

We may be turning the tide, if certain reports are to be believed, but we must never go back to way we were. We must from now on be vigilant and jealous of our liberties. We must also teach our children to be equally vigilant and jealous for it will take another generation or two to get the snake off our backs.