So What Would It Mean to Make America Great Again?

Making America great again is the theme of one of our major political party candidates.  His supporters readily agree with him, but at first some people sneered and saw this as a call for the return of racial segregation, discrimination, or, who knows, maybe even slavery.

The other political party saw the danger in this thinking and began insisting that we were already great.  Of course, they said, we already are a great nation; what could possibly need to be changed?

I happen to think that we have lost some very valuable qualities in our country, and I would like to see us get them back.  When this candidate keeps speaking of making America great, the question naturally rises, So when exactly was it great like you are saying it used to be?

Donald Trump is no historian, and so I am guessing that he is referring to an America that he remembers. 

As I get older, I am learning to appreciate older people in a new way.  Not because I am getting older myself, but because they bring a perspective to things that younger people just can’t have.  For a younger person, America has always been a certain way.  For an older person, they remember when America was not that way, and they wish it could go back to what it used to be.

So if making America great again is like being able to turn the clock back, what would be some of the set points we can say would make America greater than it is now?

I would like to suggest a few.

A recent set point would be 2001.  9/11 changed everything, but it didn’t have to. 

Our leaders have long felt that we were safe from the all the wars and problems of the rest of the world, because we were separated from all that by two oceans.  But on 9/11, the war came to us.  It wasn’t by an invading army but by people that we willingly allowed to enter our country.  Was this carelessness or stupidity?  Doesn’t matter at this point.  The point is not to let it happen again.

But we have.  Over and over again.  But many of our political leaders don’t see any connection between many of the acts of violence that have occurred in our country and our policies of who we allow or bring into our country.

However, a lot of people do see a connection.  We now have over 1,000 ongoing terror investigations going on right now.  We are monitoring over a million people on a terror watch list.  We spend hours in line waiting to get on an airplane.  We have the same kind of security now even at baseball games.  And we will have these things now forever and ever.  This is the new normal.

Nobody wants to say it, but these threats only exist because we have Muslims living in our country.  I know how this sounds today, so please let me explain.

Most Muslims are just ordinary people who only want to get on in life, just like everybody else.  I get that.  But then there are the Islamic leaders, the Islamic scholars, and the imams who teach and interpret Islam for the masses. 

Islam has a program.  You can call it the Islamization of the world.  And the freedoms and democracy of Western Civilization will allow them to do it without having much of the violence that was required in the past.

The plan begins with the mass migration of Muslims to all the non-Muslim countries of the world.  As their numbers increase, they then need to build mosques for prayers, but more importantly for the imams to teach the people the duties of Islam, including sharia law, which, by the way, supersedes the constitutions of any nation in which they live.

But let us go on.

A second checkpoint would be the early 90s, before we starting shipping all of our jobs overseas in the name of free trade.  We were told that this would benefit us by lowering the cost of imported goods and creating jobs for our export industry.  They didn’t tell us that to get the lower cost of imported goods we would have to give up millions of good paying American jobs.  And that for our export industries to prosper, we have to rely on the prosperity of other nations first so that they can buy our goods, thus placing our prosperity directly in the hands of other nations.

So bringing our nation back to the safety and security of pre-2001 American would make America much greater than it is now.  

Restoring the jobs we lost would make it greater still.  When people don’t have good paying jobs anymore, not only does our government lose tax revenue that it has to make up for elsewhere, but it also spends a lot of money providing assistance to those who don’t have the money to live on.  We lose twice.

And that’s when our government debt started really spiking.  Government debt, of course, hurts us in a number of ways: it devalues our money, and it makes everything government does more expensive, because we spend billions of dollars a year just paying interest on this debt.

Going back a few decades, we had the Viet Nam War, which we actually never officially called a war.  After World War II, we stopped declaring wars.  We just starting fighting and continued fighting until we stopped.  Fifty thousand of our soldiers died in Viet Nam, and we lost.  More like we just gave up rather than being defeated. 

If we could choose our military engagements more carefully and actually intend to win the engagement, that would do a lot to enhance our nation’s image in the world and at home. 

War is hell.  I admit that, but there is a certain clarity that comes from winning a war.  Germany and Japan surrendered at the end of World War 2.  We helped them rebuild their countries, and they have been close friends ever since.  When wars don’t end in victory and defeat, nothing gets resolved, and the hostilities continue for generations after, like in Korea and the Middle East.

We don’t declare wars anymore, so we start fighting and we fight like we are not sure if we really want to win it.  Thousands of our troops die, and nothing is resolved. 

Remaking our military use policies to focus on actually winning a war without jeopardizing the lives of our soldiers needlessly could do a lot to making our country greater again.

One more major set point in Donald Trump’s lifetime would be the 1960s.  That saw the start of the Great Society.  Right after our country signed civil rights legislation banning discrimination on the basis of race, the Johnson Administration launched the government welfare system that we still see today. 

After trillions of dollars spent, only a few things have changed. and none of them good.  One is that where welfare used to be the domain of the church, now it is the responsibility of the government.  When the church did welfare, the church knew the people who were receiving it.  People were held accountable.  That’s gone, as well as the public sentiment that getting welfare was embarrassing for people; we have now made it mainstream and totally acceptable. 

A lot of people attribute the government welfare program also for the destruction of the black American family.  Where now about 70% of black children are born to unmarried parents, the rate was probably in the low teens back in the 60s. 

So, yes, I would love to see America return in many ways to what it used to be in the past.  I am really hard-pressed to think of anything that has improved in our country due to anything that the government has done for us. 

People may fuss about what greatness in America can actually mean, and I’m not sure if Donald Trump is thinking of set points as I am, but the fact that he is even bringing up the issue encourages me that we can finally make something better than it has been.

unintended consequences of raising the minimum wage

Most people who work in grocery stores, restaurants, and fast food places make a lot less than the new minimum wages that are being pushed across the country.  As these new minimum wages go into effect, expect to see food prices increase all across the board, and we will soon be hearing again about how people can’t live on the minimum wage. 

A lot of these people working at these place, by the way, are high schoolers, college kids, and retirees, who are not expecting to live off these wages.  These are some of the few places where they can find part-time, summer, and weekend jobs.  Expect to see a lot fewer of them getting these jobs in the future.

politicians, Presidents, and sex scandals

This is a response I wrote to a friend on Facebook when she expressed embarrassment and disgust over the recent talk of Donald Trump's behavior of 2005.  Her children were particularly upset.

When we had 17 Republican candidates, I thought that there were about 7 or 8 that I could support.  As I started thinking and writing about the issues, I identified 5 that I called the iceberg sinking the ship. If the ship sinks, nothing else is going to matter. On each issue, Trump was the only one who either saw the problem, offered the best or right solution to the problem, or showed the resolution and independence to do what needs to be done.  Since then he has brought up other issues that I never imagined a candidate would bring up, and these would have incredible benefits to our country.

Hillary Clinton has lied to Congress, the FBI, and to the American people.  She left 4 Americans to die and then lied to their parents about why they died.  I can’t think of one policy, plan, or program that she has proposed that will not hurt our country.  Among others, she has spoken often of the need for religious values to be subordinated to the higher secular values.  This is how the persecution of Christians in our country will start.

John Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton had sex scandals all through their political careers, and three of them still became President.  Their same behavior continued through their time in the White House.

Trump is crude.  No question.  But frankly our political system in Washington is so corrupt and entrenched in self-serving abuse of power that it will take somebody who is not a part of the system to break it.  Samson was one of the judges of Israel, and God used him.  I don’t see anybody else who sees so much of what needs to be done, has actually talked about doing it, and has shown the independence to do it.

We are in a war for the survival of our country.  Wars are not pretty and not always suitable for  younger viewers.