Sometimes conservatives seem to be misery junkies. It’s like we get a psychic thrill from telling each other that the end of the world is at hand.
Admittedly, everything isn’t coming up roses. That scent in the air isn’t from flowers.
But there’s still more cause for comfort than despair. “Let not your heart be troubled.” Here are seven reasons to hope for America.
1. There’s an explosion of conservative activism
According to the latest Gallup poll, 38% of Americans are self-identified conservatives, against only 24% who call themselves liberals, and 34% moderates.
Even after six and a half years of the most dogmatically leftist administration in our history, with a mainstream media shamelessly pimping for its policies and Hollywood casting conservatives as a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Elmer Gantry well over a third of Americans say they’re conservatives, against slightly less than one-quarter who call themselves liberals (doubtless, most with post-graduate liberal arts degrees or Obama phones).
At the grassroots, the movement has never been stronger. Those with a passionate commitment to life, marriage, border security, Second Amendment rights, the free market and fighting jihad are energized and mobilized. The National Rifle Association has 4.5 million members compared to 300,000 for People for the American Way. The National Right to Life Committee has more than 3,000 chapters.
Rush Limbaugh has a weekly audience of 13.25 million. Sean Hannity has 12.5 million. There is 7 million each for The Glenn Beck Program and The Mark Levin Show, and 5.25 million for The Savage Nation. The only liberal talk-show in Talkers magazine’s list of most-listened-to radio programs is Thom Hartman, with a weekly audience of 2 million.
MSNBC is moving its studios to a packing crate.
2. America is awash in firearms
God bless America! Thomas Jefferson wrote: “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.”
America has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world 88.8 per 100 residents in 2014, against 30.8 for Canada and 31.2 in France. What can handguns and hunting rifles do against a military equipped for urban warfare? Ask the Warsaw Ghetto fighters who armed with pistols, homemade grenades and a few automatic weapons held off 2,000 crack German troops for a month.
If the Communist Party hadn’t disarmed the Chinese people decades earlier, Tiananmen Square might have turned out differently.
I sleep sounder knowing there are as many as 330 million guns in private hands in the United States.
3. Despite the relentless secularist assault, America is still connected to its Judeo-Christian roots
The United States has weekly church attendance of 39% according to one poll. In Canada, it’s 20%, in the United Kingdom and France, only 12%.
Our religious convictions run deep, all the way back to our founding. From the Declaration of Independence (“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”) to the Gettysburg Address (“that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”) to FDR’s D-Day Prayer (“Almighty God; Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty crusade to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”), a firm reliance on Providence is woven into our national character.
America is still the instrument to set free a suffering humanity. If we stay true to that great mission and again turn our faces toward Him, God will not forget us.
4. Americans have preserved their fighting spirit
Since 9/11, over one million young Americans have answered their nation’s call to duty. More than 4,000 have died fighting for that cause.
Army Col. Michael J. Forsyth (stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf in Alaska) notes: “All of those who have volunteered to serve since 9/11 have done so with the knowledge that they will most likely deploy into combat to Iraq, Afghanistan or both. With this level of volunteerism in a volatile world, is it justifiable to say that this generation of Americans is any less deserving of esteem than previous generations?”
While our interventions haven’t always been wise, or our forces used wisely, that there are still millions of young men and women willing to walk the ramparts in defense of their country and to build a better world is reason for hope.
5. Resilience is an American virtue
Pound us, pummel us, pulverize us, and we always bounce back. We’ve survived a foreign invasion (and beat the best army in the world to win our independence), a bloody Civil War, the Great Depression, any number of recessions, two World Wars (the last in which the fate of humanity hung in the balance), Korea, Viet Nam (when the communists opened a second front on our college campuses) and an ideological assault from a once-great party gone rogue.
Our economy has taken body blows from the New Deal to you-didn’t-build-that, and we’ve come through it all. That’s part of the American exceptionalism the left will never understand.
6. Reality can’t be evaded indefinitely
It wasn’t its command economy, or military overreach, or the lack of will to maintain rule by an ideology no one really believed in any more. It was reality that doomed the Soviet Union. Whatever dogma it’s dressed in, attempts to remake human nature will fail.
The left’s chickens aren’t just coming home to roost they’re coming in with feathers flying, squawking madly.
The Baltimore/Ferguson riots were courtesy of liberalism’s destruction of the black family. If Islam is the religion of peace, ISIS must be having a peace march across the Middle East. The fact that in the United States 72% of new HIV infections are confined to 2% of the population demonstrates that “sexuality” is not without consequences.
The suppression of speech on campus and the persecution of Christians everywhere reflect the innate Stalinism of the American left. The unfolding nightmare of Obamacare shows the hazards of bureaucratized medicine.
Despite media manipulation, academic indoctrination, and politicians addicted to lying, reality will always have the last word. More often than not, it’s no you can’t.
7. The nation that blesses Israel in turn will be blessed
No country has been better to the Jews and is more supportive of the Jewish state than that nation founded on the Jewish Bible.
In a 2013 BBC poll, 51% of Americans said they had a mainly positive view of Israel (32% mainly negative). Beyond these shores, Zion has few friends 25% of Canadians are positive about Israel, as are 21% of the French, 15% of Greeks, 14% of Brits and 4% of Spanish.
Americans were Zionists before Israel existed. John Adams declared. “I will insist that Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation.” Both our second president and his son, John Quincy (our 6th president) expressed the hope that one day the Jews would again live in their homeland as a sovereign people.
America was instrumental in the rebirth of Israel. The United States was the first country to offer de facto recognition to the new state on the day it declared its independence in 1948. For over 60 years, America’s diplomatic and military support has created a firewall for a nation besieged from its inception. Obama is a deviation soon to be forgotten.
Every anti-Semitic state or regime has been cursed from the Roman Empire to Czarist Russia, from the Third Reich to the Soviet Union. America has a rich account of blessings to draw on.
Problems we have aplenty. But while acknowledging the multiple crises which confront us, let’s not forget that the roots of American greatness are still strong.
America is more than a land and a people. It’s a heritage, a cause and an ideal.
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Author Don Feder writing for Barbwire.com is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
Reprinted with permission via LibertyAlliance.
Photo credit David Ohmer
