Disgruntled Patriot

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA


Many different challenges have risen over time endangering the strong and resourceful American society. Each of these challenges have been faced proudly by American citizens and dealt with handily. American citizens have proven to be resilient survivors against the treacherous rule of the English crown, the fear of Fascism terrorizing the world, and even the powerful threat of Communism that held the ability to destroy the American lifestyle. Today we face the challenge of combating terrorism from all around the globe but have a more disturbing and uncontrolled challenge within our own borders, deep within the mindset of Americans themselves. This mindset supports an undeserved sense of entitlement, encouragement of weakness without the promotion of strength, and the limiting of an individual’s acceptance for responsibility of their own actions.

To our own citizens, we should provide as we always have, opportunity, not this continuing sense of entitlement spreading at the hand of those pretending to be more compassionate of minorities and people who are “different,” all in the name of generating votes and power. An “individual” shouldn’t be entitled to anything in this country other than opportunity on the basis of freedom, which should not be viewed as a right but more as a luxury since so many in the world are without it. We have the opportunity and freedom to succeed or fail, to try or not, and even do right or do wrong. Freedom, that abused concept, lost its true meaning long ago, and the people currently suffering from it are the honest, hard-working, loyal, and stubborn Americans who believe the only way to succeed in life is to be trustworthy and dependable always, even at the cost of being forsaken.

In today’s job market, any employer will stand and testify to the drastic decrease in the reliability of the average employee in America. The disgruntled and lazy group has been replacing many of the remaining hard workers. Many Americans are more worried about how long of a lunch break they get and how often they are afforded the opportunity to gossip and complain on their employer’s buck, rather than being concerned with ways in which they could strengthen or better the workplace they attend daily. Any manager will admit that over ninety percent of their time is spent dealing with problems developed from problematic employees rather than issuing adequate attention and incentives to their hardworking few. There are many possible causes for this growing unreliable workforce, one being the federal intervention restricting employers the ability, or freedom, to hire and fire as necessary.

As an American, all you deserve is opportunity, nothing more. There are too many individuals concerned with reaping large benefits from doing little or nothing at all. This country “should” be built on the concept of “if you want something, work hard for it.”

Another concern of mine is we live in a society focusing on the “weak” rather than encouraging people to be strong. Daily, we bend over backwards for people who are unable to or won’t do what it takes to become successful. Businesses thrive off of competition which challenges them to provide a more demanded product, employees work hard towards a promotion on reliability and efficiency, even little league baseball teams work hard to be the very best so they can stand above the competition. What is our society’s answer to these successes? Businesses are provided subsidies that virtually match their competitor’s superior profits, unions or like programs are created in an effort to define a workforce where merit is based off employment time rather than hard work and reliability, and baseball teams are better funded and given a larger coaching staff than the previous year’s victor.

I can safely say that if we continue to promote and encourage weakness, our culture will fade away and the enemies of democracy will prove successful. Many people object to the idea that teachers and schools should receive annual incentives for providing the highest test scores in the country, of the belief that these incentives should be spent within the school districts where test scores are the lowest. What message does this send to schools, teachers, and students? What happened to challenging people to be better? What is the motivation for teachers and students to work harder for a new library or gymnasium? If they want to get their new facilities in today’s society, they need to provide the lowest scores in the country. Keep that in mind as you put your kids on the school bus in the morning.

Our encouragement of this principle, “weakness is ok,” isn’t contained to just the individual level, it is extended to state governments as well. It is the duty of state governors and legislatures to run their government independently from the federal government. The decisions they make each day affect their residents and poor decisions hurt their residents. If a state raises taxes and passes legislature that makes it difficult for manufacturing and industrial jobs to operate, and thousands of jobs flee to a reasonable state leaving many unemployed, the state isn’t held responsible. When a state is unable to provide jobs, education, and healthcare to its residents, the federal government is always there to provide aid. When a state achieves historical levels of success in areas like low unemployment, high average income, excellent student test scores, or any other factors to prove the success of governors and legislators, they receive no attention.

If a state’s elected government makes bad decisions that directly affect their constituents, the people should feel the consequences and burden for voting the wrong people to office. In many states, the residents don’t know the truth about how their state is being funded and is operating on policies making them entirely reliant on the federal government. Our state governments should be held responsible and forced to independently sustain their state needs provided the absence of national disasters or emergency conditions.

In the past, America’s ability to take responsibility for its failings has been the source of pride and distinction throughout the world. No individual, family, group, state, or country is without error and should therefore accept the responsibility for their actions. Today’s mindset instead excuses everyone from the obligation of responsibility by forcing blame on others, gun violence is charged to gun manufacturers not criminals, individuals who have their homes foreclosed upon blame financers, and parents blame the education system for failing rather than the students whose number one priority is playing video games or the government for restricting teachers and limiting creativity. The truth of the matter is that people are going to commit crimes with or without legal gun purchases, individuals who irresponsibly enter into a financial contract they can’t pay for should lose their homes, and no matter how good the education system might ever be, without parents implementing a strong focus on education within the household and the government allowing teachers to inspire knowledge the system will fail. The simplest way to combat this problem is for everyone to accept responsibility for their actions, learn from their mistakes, share those mistakes with others, and more importantly, for the government to stop restricting an individuals potential and creativity.

It is unclear when or why this mindset began to develop within the borders of our great nation, but starting immediately, efforts need to be made towards its reversal. If America cannot once again develop strong, responsible, and hard working individuals all throughout the country, then we shall never prosper and be afforded the opportunity to chase down our own “American Dream.”

Throughout the history of our great nation, our citizens have joined together to battle enemies spreading mayhem around the world. Our country found its birth because our “Founding Fathers” stood together to oppose a government that was destroying their spirit with over taxation and denying them the right to freedom.

Nazi Germany might have conquered the globe had our soldiers and citizens not united against them while simultaneously battling Imperial Japan. The country united, not just the American fighting force, and proudly worked together to defeat the common enemy. With Fascism beaten backwards, our new enemy on the horizon clearly defined itself as Communism. When we dispatched soldiers into Vietnam to fight this enemy, the soldiers fought and died but the country never united behind them. Instead, many took the opportunity to practice their freedom of speech and protested against the war, which undoubtedly caused the United States of America to display its first sign of weakness. Communism did however, provide us inspiration to compete and challenge causing Americans to invent, create, and perform as never before resulting in placing a man on the moon. Our citizens still carried a great deal of pride for their country.

After witnessing the overwhelming success of the Gulf War, many believed our time of weakness and retreat was over. The might of our fighting force easily prevailed over the fourth largest military in the world with limited hardships.

Weakness has been once again shown at the resistance of our newest formal enemy, terrorism. This new enemy despises Democracy and will do anything to destroy it in an attempt to preserve a more inhumane culture. Our citizens are being manipulated by our own citizens and therefore, the possibility of everyone uniting behind our fighting force is impossible. We have lost the ability to unite, but we must once again dig deep and learn to return freedom to is place at the top of our priorities. No individual citizen, or their needs, should be placed above the success of our nation, at home or abroad.

It is time to fix this country now, or failure is sure to destroy our great nation. Many of the people who corrupted the efforts to battle Communism in Vietnam are the very same people standing out against our efforts to combat terrorism. Can you see a problem with this? Could it be that the people who’s protests resulted in our defeat in Vietnam will cause yet another defeat? If such is the case, the defeat will end up on American soil.

It is time for this sickness to be expelled from the Soul of America. We have to once again learn to unite as a country in the efforts to defeat our enemies. Our mindset and priorities will have to change to represent those of people who actually believe in freedom and liberties and recognize the billions of individuals in the world tortured daily, and die without ever knowing freedom.