The Apple Of The Adams’ Eyes

   "Had he lived in any country... when abuses of power were to be resisted, he would have...suffered excommunication, rather than have bowed to papal infallibility ...”

   These words, from the biography of one of our greatest intellects and orators, describe the Massachusetts Governor, cousin and uncle to presidents, Samuel Adams. Alive today, he would have scoffed that flooding town halls in protest of wrong minded government intervention and profligate spending on health care was anything but patriotic and dutiful.

   How dare you, Madame Speaker Pelosi, compare protesters to goose stepping Nazis or sully the soil they have sown with their labors as mere Astroturf? They have shown both passion and prudence in their actions, placing themselves at personal risk standing as sentinels against the abuse of power and the emasculation of American freedoms.

   Of course there has been hyperbole on both sides of the debate. The silly, in service of the substantial, is part of freedom’s plot. Both sides know that. Its absence from the drama would be inhuman and a hindrance to a most humane debate. Namely; how does a nation embrace the health of its citizens from cradle to grave; what is its true role?

   Leaders know that moments of leadership are on loan from the people and can waft away on the wings of their rhetoric. Leaders understand their tongue may be the enemy of their political neck. Put your jacket and tie back on, Mr. Obama, it’s time to go to American school. Lesson one; sometimes a nation choosing to not act precipitously is one of the most courageous, tense and vigorous actions of all; fraught with thought, not indecision.

   An informed and passionate electorate seeking to right the ship of state is not a hidden reef foundering families, businesses and communities, drowning them in a flood of health care costs. It is wave after wave of administrative inexperience, arrogance and disdain for disagreement that will bring us to broach, enfeeble us through entitlement and deluge us with titanic debt even Atlas couldn’t shoulder.

   President Clinton opined that protesters knew the only chance of defeating this legislative limburger would come at the cost of “mortifying” the masses. A nation failing to wake, too long asleep to the joys of creative productivity thriving in a free market, is mortifying. A nation hemorrhaging its heritage from self inflicted wounds, like a failed roman nobleman exsanguinating in a tepid bath, is mortifying. Ignoring mathematics telling us we can’t afford single payer politburo schemes which will degenerate into the rape of rationed medical care and the assassination of unfettered access to the best health care in world history is mortifying.

   Mr. Obama, spend more time with American hearts, minds and hearths. We are those who hid in the bushes and beat the British. We launch rockets to the moon and prayers to a loving God we hold dear. We are a land where we stand against evil, musket and bible in one hand, the other outstretched to help. Follow our lead.

   History will favorably judge these moments wherein the greatest American asset, we, the people, stood tall as those mighty men-oaks from Quincy, Massachusetts. The public option for health care, the single payer pariah, must and will die if we do not relent. Reform is needed and there are problems we can solve.

   As parents and grandparents lead the way, it is the health of the hearts and minds of our children and grandchildren that must concern us. Tell our young; disconnect from addictive technocracy, withdraw from disappearance into the impersonal digital world and embrace the beauty unfolding before you as those who gave you life give it again practicing what our founders preached. Parents, listen for the sound of apples not falling far from the Adam’s family tree. That is your children that must take seed and thrive.

©2009 Kevin Ryan