Is it sunset in America?

Despite the picture, this isn't a pretty concept.

If you listen to or read the news for any length of time, what you hear seems to be nothing but bad: everything from soup to nuts costs more, crime spiraling out of control, our military taking a break from falling short of its recruitment goals and ejecting those who didn’t take the jab to use $400k missiles to shoot down balloons, and all around the world there appears to be nothing but war and rumors of war. That would be a really good explanation for consumer confidence being down, wouldn’t it?

Yet I remember a time not all that long ago when a Presidential candidate came up with a powerful message: “It’s morning in America.” I remember it well because that’s the first Presidential election I ever voted in, and I was proud to cast my first Presidential vote to re-elect Ronald Reagan. Back then, I was beginning to become aware of how politics affected me, a typical college student at a Midwestern public university. I had seen how reducing the bite that government took out of our paychecks began to affect the economy in positive ways, and how strong, bipartisan leadership was turning around what was heretofore a general malaise in our country. All that seems so far away now, a relic in the vein of American Gothic.

Yet even for all my love of all things Reagan, I can now see he made one decision that turned out to be a significant mistake in the long run. After all, an unbiased look at any President, even from his most staunch supporters, would find at least one instance of the people wishing they had a mulligan. In Reagan’s case, his big mistake was signing the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which paved the way for the mess we now have at our southern border (and with our immigration system in general) because it made amnesty for illegal aliens a precedent.

Reagan was also the president when the manufacturing exodus to China began, although that continued through the next several decades to where we are today. Our enemy in Beijing has shrewdly cornered the market on several vital materials for green energy and has leveraged its position in the world to place itself as the dictator of economic decisions of a number of client nations through its Belt and Road Initiative.

Unfortunately, since Reagan left office we have endured a succession of subpar leaders, many of whom have seemed to have enriched themselves vastly while in office. Others were already fairly wealthy when they got there, of course - it’s pretty difficult for a poor person to get far in the political world without owing a lot of favors. Regardless, it seems as though our nation is looking for a savior: someone to ride into Washington D.C. on an ass and be the ruler we believe will drain the Swamp and wipe away the Deep State. Reagan tapped into that longing to an extent - hence the “Morning in America” tagline - but it was that vein of support Donald Trump used to propel himself to the Oval Office, only to find the tentacles of power there to oppose him were more than he could handle.

So let’s take an honest, unbiased look at our nation. Is there hope for reining in our current federal behemoth or its fifty state-level offspring? Short of a revolution or coup d’etat on the level of 1776, likely not. We’ve placed ourselves in a situation where too many people either depend on or prosper through the corrupt system of government we have now; in either case, enough votes have been bought off as to make national elections somewhat meaningless when it comes to overall popular vote. (Here in Delaware where I live, the same is true: voters registered as Democrats and allied parties control just a shade under half the vote, meaning the opposition has to absolutely run the table - and that doesn’t happen.)

It’s why I don’t belong to either of the two major parties and thus I’m not afraid to go “off the board” when it comes to voting. In this situation I can vote my conscience, and furthermore it allows me to eschew a politically correct narrative when I feel it doesn’t suit me.

So, just as a reminder, I set up my piece for today back on Wednesday by writing about the concept of a national divorce. If you didn’t see that piece, it may be wise to open that tab and read that one.

The national divorce

While I don’t think divorce is a practical idea, part of me feels we’re rapidly entering a post-Constitutional stage in American history. I’ve come to that conclusion because the Constitution is a document that’s being ignored for the most part: laughed at by our selected executives who write law for themselves, paid lip service to by a Congress that’s far more concerned about re-election and finding ways to sell their influence under the table than conducting meaningful oversight and budgeting or creating new law the proper way, and set aside by a court system that somehow has a multitude of ways of interpreting a document mostly written in the plain language of the 18th and 19th centuries. To be fair, though, there was a period in the early 20th century that we put a lot of things in the Constitution that really didn’t belong there and only got rid of one of them: Prohibition. If only we had soured on the income tax and direct election of Senators just as quickly.

Another way to express my thoughts on this concept of sunset is to bring up another Reagan-era chestnut: the song by Lee Greenwood called God Bless the U.S.A. The tune was originally released in 1984, but nearly 40 years later there’s still a slight uptick in its popularity every year between Memorial Day and Independence Day. Yet while we as a patriotic nation sing the refrain, do we really stop to seek God’s blessing on our land and - more importantly - do we act as though we mean it?

To that end, Ronald Reagan spoke frequently of America being a “shining city on a hill,” the reference to Jesus and His Sermon on the Mount detailed in the Book of Matthew passed through John Winthrop and on to Reagan’s speechwriters. In his Farewell Address, Reagan noted:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

What have we done since then to see that “her glow has held steady”? I fear that the lust for absolute power by the absolutely corrupt is placing that light shone by our Creator and the Constitution He inspired under a bushel, marking the sunset of America. Surely there will be the lines on the map that denote the united states of America, but, to borrow from Reagan once again, we’re finding out the hard way that freedom really is one generation from extinction.

Finally, it’s been said that one’s lifetime tastes are dictated by the culture they lived in between the ages of 16 and 22. When Ronald Reagan was elected I was 16 years old, so that’s the America I remember: strong, patriotic, and free. (It also featured kick-ass hair metal and Hollywood movies, but that’s a topic for another day.) That doesn’t mean America didn’t have issues, but certainly with the optimism and can-do spirit we had in that era from all Americans we knew we could solve them.

Compare that to what our Generation Z, the Zoomers, are dealing with. If you were born between 2001 and 2007, you’ve grown up in the sewer of the internet, gotten an indoctrination on how America was racist, bigoted, and homophobic, and seen more than your share of war, violence, famine, and pestilence. Your vision of America is negative, sort of like the malaise we suffered through in the late 1970s but amplified through social media (often controlled by our enemies) to be malaise on steroids, if there could be such an oxymoron.

I was blessed to grow up with a leader so I didn’t have to be one, but that’s not true of every generation. Perhaps we Boomers and Gen X’ers coasted on our laurels for too long. Sometimes a generation has to take it upon themselves, and - truth be told - that may be just what our nation needs.

It’s never been said that we’re entitled to have this Constitutional form of government on this particular plot of global land. We have to keep working to maintain our republic. But if it’s not this coming generation that takes up the cause of restoring and preserving our American light of freedom, who will?