Pulling in the right direction
And asking just where our place is.
I’m sure I have told you this before, but I’m a big believer on knowing what the opposition is up to. To that end, I get most of the missives from Indivisible, and one of their latest was a summary by co-founder Leah Greenberg regarding the State of the Union show. There she castigated the GOP response as “a nasty weirdo trash fire” and said:
(Sarah Huckabee) Sanders was speaking to the right-wing, MAGA wackadoodles who live in the Fox News Universe. For those of us -- which is to say the vast majority of Americans - who don’t live in that universe, the speech just didn’t make much sense.
I would contend that half the time what Joe Biden is saying doesn’t make sense, either. But let’s look at the state of play these days.
According to Nielsen ratings reported by various news outlets, 27.3 million people watched the State of the Union address, and if you assume that Fox News represents the right wing of the country, only about 1/4 of the audience was conservative, as the Fox network and Fox News combined for 6.4 million viewers. We have close to 350 million people in America, so it appears that 90% of them don’t really care about Joe Biden’s laundry list of proposals and whatever games he thought he was playing with the GOP - hence, the second-lowest SotU ratings ever, and a far cry from 20-30 years ago when the address was more of a “must watch” event - over twice as many would watch in a nation that was significantly smaller. More of the people relied on news coverage of the event, which naturally would favor Biden so that most of the reviews were positive.
And maybe a third to half of that initial 27 million group stuck around to hear what Sanders had to say, which makes it even less relevant. Basically by that point, around 10:30 or so on the East Coast where most of the pundits live, it was the political diehards whose opinion wasn’t going to be swayed anyway. That’s the lot of the President’s political opposition, which - truth be told - would probably never air with a Democrat president (and would be a live, on-air simultaneous “fact checking” response for a Republican leader) if the mainstream media had its way. Heck, I never even read what Sanders had to say and I barely skimmed the SotU because my job isn’t to comment on those specifically, aside from the pull quote I picked out for my previous post.
Anyway, I digress. If you rated political values on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being practically Stalinist tyranny and 10 being the blessings of liberty, you would find Indivisible as a 2 and me as a 9.5 or more. I cheerfully own up to being barely left of militia, but they will never admit to admiration of Marx and Stalin because that doesn’t play well with Americans who love “muh freedom.” My job, besides that of eliminating the rocks and thorns from the soil so the seed of the missionary can better sprout in good ground, is to increase the number on the political scale I outlined above. So you could say I go a little farther in some aspects, such as my last post about the entitlement system we have in this country. To have a more perfect Union, I believe government needs to be rightsized.
Using that analogy of a political value scale, I think each succeeding generation has become a deduction of one - those who are still among us from the Silent Generation (excepting Joe Biden) are a 6, the Baby Boomers are a 5, Generation X is a 4.1 (that’s the generation I identify with, being on the cusp between two, hence the extra 0.1), Millennials a 3, and the new Generation Z might truly be a 2 because they don’t know any better. We’ve failed on the Proverbs 22:6 front and I pray the recent awakening by some isn’t too late. Obviously Indivisible is catering to the Millennials and Generation Z among us because they’re younger, have fewer responsibilities to family, and more energy to be activists. They’re taking Proverbs 22:6 and perverting it to a Leninist end.
Because of the reality of aging, I’ve become aware that my time remaining in this world isn’t as long as the time I’ve spent here. Still, I have my own talent on loan from God - an homage to Rush Limbaugh, who passed two years ago yesterday - and it’s distilling and discussing whether rights are God-given or created by government - rendered by Caesar, as it were. And I don’t ask that you agree with me, but that you might do for me a couple of favors to help out the cause:
I don’t come from the means of having my wedding featured in the New York Times as the son and daughter of political insiders, nor was there dark seed money invested in me to get my advocacy underway. All I have is the audience I’ve built up from scratch through years of hard work and the desire to start moving those 2’s to become 5’s and those 3’s to become 7’s. They don’t have to agree with me 100 percent, but if those of us on the right side of the equation get them to 60 or 80 percent we will be in a lot better shape.
I’m glad Leah Greenberg and her husband Ezra Levin have a young and growing family. Presumably since they both have a work-at-home type of job, they are blessed with the time necessary to raise their kids properly. My prayer is that they come to their senses on how best to raise them and create a land where they can live freely, without the shadow of big, tyrannical government stalking them all their days.