Forgetting Who We Are

I thought this letter worth posting. ~Bob

Many Americans are feeling queasy about a president whose criticisms of America on occasion seem to resemble those of our enemies, terrorists who hate capitalism and think America deserves a “come-uppance.” These uneasy citizens see Mr. Obama remaining as the least-known president ever, refusing to unseal a giant paper trail of documents of the type that every other president made public. However, there is much that is already public: his family history, friends, teachers, and supporters, organizational memberships, radical advisor-appointees, and his brazen criticisms of our Constitution. He is deeply steeped in radical socialism. In bookstores one can find such copiously footnoted exposé’s as The Manchurian President (Klein), and To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine (Gingrich), with much information not well-publicized until after Obama’s election.

The election of a seriously socialist American president critical of his own country was probably inevitable, given the educational background of voters that helped make his election possible. In the words of American educator Samuel Blumenfeld, “…There has been in this country a deliberate plan to change the nature of American education so that the American people could be easily led into socialism.” (“The Dumbing Down of America,” in Faith for All of Life, Nov/Dec, 2005, p. 20; doubters of this observation should Google the flamingly Marxist, best-selling text, A People’s History of the United States, by the late Howard Zinn.) This “deliberate plan” over the last half-century is too often accompanied by a gradual dumbing-down and denigration of our national self-image. We may be the only country which educates its citizens to feel guilty about our past history and present prosperity.

I doubt if most voters have heard a sober explanation of why capitalism is the best economic system, nor have they been taught about the historic failures of socialism, the proverbial road paved with the good intentions. While it can be couched in Christian terminology and misconstrued Biblical texts, socialism invariably hurts the very people it seeks to help. Too many have been educated to believe (a) that socialism wouldn’t be all that bad with good people to oversee it, and (b) that the Constitution is an old-fashioned document. These biases are also often accompanied by (c) an intemperate, revisionist view of American history which concentrates on every past mistake or injustice, while neglecting completely the enormous amount of good accomplished. Such revisionism, although rightly rejecting the unhealthy attitude of “my country, right or wrong,” replaces it with “my country, always wrong.” Having learned through this dumbed-down revisionist template, too many high school graduates view their own nation as a socially unjust, imperialist exploiter of the world founded by ignorant ethnic bigots in powdered wigs.

The developing fashion in higher education is to require courses on global perspectives or diversity which often reinforce this leftist programming. Things will never get better for our nation as long as the “global perspective” of the American electorate includes demonizing capitalism, promoting social guilt, and caricaturing patriotism as corny. This produces college graduates who see American exceptionalism only as arrogance.

On revisionist history: http://www.westernconservatory.com/article/2010/01/why-public-school-system-teaches-revisionist-history

On capitalism: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/

On American exceptionalism: http://www.prageru.com/index.php?option=com_hwdvideoshare&task=viewvideo&Itemid=53&video_id=7

J. Michael Gibson