Reality Check 101

Some months ago this column ran a piece predicting what would happen in the event that Congress was surrendered to left-leaning Democrats and the White House was occupied by an ultra-liberal president.  The concern at the time was not for party politics or for the racial background of any candidate.  The admonition was instead looking forward to the impact onAmerica’s moral fabric and cultural infrastructure in the event that citizens ushered in a new administration for economic reasons rather than on the basis of much deeper, more enduring and far more important standards.

Pam Geller, journalist and historian, offers this analysis from a similar time in social history.  “He was elected to office, with a full-throttled economic crisis at hand [the Great Depression].  Slowly but surely he seized the controls of government power, department by department, person by person, bureaucracy by bureaucracy.”  She continued, “How did he get the people on his side?  He did it promising jobs to the jobless, money to the moneyless, and goodies for the military-industrial complex.  He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, acrossEurope, and across the world.”

Most Americans seem to live in a state of vain security, believing that we could never succumb to the social sicknesses that eventually ravaged 1930’s Germany.  But “he” can represent one person or many when there is a perfect storm forming.

In the last one hundred days, the volume of under-reported congressional activity and administrative policy changes has been staggering.  Too little has been written or broadcast about federal plans to take over health care and make it abortion-friendly.  Alternative media has been alone in taking note of efforts to restrict private ownership of firearms, limit free speech in radio and on the internet, introduce radio chip embedded driver’s licenses, establish emergency detention camps, and form a quazi-military civilian “security” force.  Hardly a whisper has been heard about fast track legislation creating specially protected classes of citizens, criminalizing selected private thoughts, endangering U.S. industrial viability through cap and trade agreements and killing the secret ballot in the workplace.

As if to expose the true mindset behind Washington’s change campaign, the Department of  Homeland Security (DHS) issued an April seventh “Rightwing Extremism” report.  It was not intended for public consumption for good reason.  According to an unclassified summary, future threats exist from rightwing extremists including anyone who opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, or gun control.  Anyone who believes the Bible’s end times prophecies, opposes a one-world government, or has supported a third party candidate are also deemed extremists.  What is especially disturbing is that the report singles out returning military veterans as especially dangerous.

For DHS to formulate this report for dissemination to federal and state law enforcement agencies is astounding.  It gives no statistical evidence or findings of fact to justify its judgments against law-abiding citizens.  The report should frighten every freedom-loving American whether right, left or in the middle because it portends future activities which the Bill of Rights was specifically designed to prevent.  Worse, this was only an unclassified summary of one classified report from a series of reports.

Our city is not so far away from all this as one might think.  Increasingly Holland movers and shakers are marginalizing its traditional values; either cowering at the mere possibility of a threat or actively promoting a “cool city” attitude that will eventually exacerbate anti-conservative hyper-vigilance.  Tulip Time organizers’ rejection of the Holland Right to Life (HRTL), a decades-long vetted community organization, is the perfect example.

The festival is billed as one of the largest family-friendly events of its kind in the nation but the barring o f HRTL’s float exposes a different agenda.  This year Tulip Time will continue demonstrating that Dutch heritage supposedly includes alcohol as a valued family playmate while life itself is not worthy of recognition for a couple of hours.  Standing for the sacred seems to be too dangerous.

Even many conservatives would say that defending a float is misguided if not foolish.  One has to wonder what will they say when their values, those right-wing extremist “threats”, become even more problematic and require “solutions”.