The Formula for a Bright Future is Right in Front of Us

Pessimism and helplessness. Popular words to describe the mood of America today—at least by those portions of the punditry who forever want to enter the “I proclaimed the this-time-it’s-different decline of America first club”; the first to wax poetic and nostalgic for days gone by when American parents were optimistic that their children would grow up into a better life than theirs. Peggy Noonan is the latest poster child for this group.

These pundits are just the children who did in fact grow into a better life than their parents, but in their affluence and ease wandered off into high-minded, sophisticated intellectual nonsense about how and why that happened. But it’s not a mystery as to how and why life can always get better in America, and there are plenty of Americans who know it’s not a mystery. In fact, putting aside the media elites and the Political Class, it’s a huge majority of Americans who know it.

It’s the simple formula of God, family, freedom and country. This was the formula of the Founding Fathers; it is codified in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. It was right then; it is right, now; it will be right, in future generations. It will never be outgrown or rendered obsolete by any faux sophistication calling itself ‘modernity’.

We’ve quoted before the old question, “if you’re feeling distant from God, who moved?” The same sentiment applies to the American formula. If we’re feeling distant from what has been called the American dream; if we’re seeing an economic mess; if we’re seeing a societal condition plagued by all manner of abuse, illegitimacy, abortion, poverty and crime; if we’re seeing a bankrupt government determined to control more and more of our lives with more and more corrupt, inefficient and bankrupt government agencies—who moved? Not the formula. It’s still there, right in front of us. We just have to return to it and follow it.

One nation under God. Not under Buddha, not under Allah, not under atheism. Under God.

All men and women created equal by their loving Creator. Not all men and women assured of equal lives, but all men and women with the freedom to improve themselves and their lives in the way they choose, subject to and in accordance with Judeo-Christian moral standards (not subject to and in accordance with the shifting winds of political correctness).

All men and women with inalienable individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not men and women with group rights against other groups. Not rights alienable and alterable and circumscribed by government, but inalienable rights endowed by God.

Simple, but not easy.

Is there a mess of unfulfilled and unfulfillable promises made by an irresponsible and out-of-control government? There surely is, and at federal, state and local levels. It will not be easy terminating some of those promises, while amending other promises to a level that can be kept, while restoring trust that the amended promises will be kept. There will be howls of various kinds, predictions of the catastrophic implications of ‘default’, paper losses will in fact occur, and some public and private institutions will close. But these painful adjustments will be more than compensated for through the catharsis that ejects the cancer of government irresponsibility and elitism and racism, and replaces it with the original American ethic of individual freedom and responsibility under God.

Free men and women—without regard to skin color, size, shape or socioeconomic background—who are unapologetic but humble in the acknowledgement of the rightness of the American formula, are the most creative, productive, energetic, unselfish, compassionate, philanthropic people in human history. They always will be.

The same pundits who lament the sense of pessimism and helplessness that they feel, are the same people who would scoff and smirk at the simpletons who believe that a return to the American formula is the answer. They would lecture us on the vast complexities of modern life, of the global economy, of world interdependence, of the impossibility of reversing societal trends—of all sorts of problems, all dressed up with sophisticated jargon, and all infinitely above the understanding of the mostly ignorant people they have to share the planet with. They are wrong.

The American awakening that has been proceeding at hyperspeed over the last 18 months—manifest most vividly in the tea party movement—can, without question save and restore the American Constitutional Republic, and faster than anyone thinks possible. The formula for success and a bright future is right in front of us.

Paul Gable

August 6, 2010