So… I’m sitting here at my desk at work in the business that my wife and I have built over the past fifteen years. I’m trying to do a bit of forecasting for the coming year and I’m drawing a blank. Not that this is anything unusual. It happens every year about this time, except this one is different. I’m drawing a blank because this time around, I have far more of a challenge ahead of me than I’d ordinarily face.
In life, as in any small business, you have known and unknown factors to consider when trying to chart the landscape ahead. You think these through and make a determination about your direction while all the time understanding that you have to be willing to remain flexible enough to respond to any number of things that pop up.
Here’s the thing this time around: We have an election coming up next week for those of you who have been off the planet recently and haven’t had a chance to follow events down here on the Third Rock from the Sun. This particular election isn’t like any we’ve ever had in this country. We have the likelihood of seeing a candidate elected who has repeatedly stated his intent to move this nation toward a Socialist direction.
As part of this effort, he and his sycophants have promised to make a direct, head-on assault on me personally. Did he mention me by name?
Follow up:
No. Did he mention my business by name? No. So why would I say he plans to come after me personally? Simple… I and thousands of others like me make this country run. We generate the larger portion of income, employment, taxes, goods and services in this country. We are productive. We give others opportunity to become the best they can be. We believe in honor and integrity. We believe in the pursuit of happiness.
But most importantly, we do it independent of the government. Most of us would be extremely, idiotically, overwhelmingly thrilled to have the government completely out of our lives. And because of this attitude, we are a threat to him and all the rest like him.
So, maybe a bit of history is in order here. I’m 54 and will be 55 on November 7th. I grew up on the tail end of the Flower Power, Peace and Love, Long-haired Hippy-Dippy era. I was in the last draft for Vietnam (got number 299 so missed out on the draft). I actually voted for Jimmy Carter before I had a clue what I was getting us all into. I went into the US Air Force in 1973 and got out in 1992 (plus a few years on inactive Reserve). I started this business in 1994 literally from the kitchen table with no idea of what I was doing.
We aren’t anywhere near anyone’s definition of rich but we make an honest living doing what we do better than anyone else. The same set of principles and dedication to something bigger than ourselves that we learned in the military is in play every day in this business. Today, there are four of us working here, all ex-Air Force veterans, all Conservative Americans, all who spent the better years of their young adult lives working to keep people with this candidate’s belief system at bay in foreign lands. We thought we defeated them…
Little did we realize that those whack-jobs with the same Socialist belief system who marched in the streets in the 1960’s and 1970’s would end up en masse in the News Media, Academia, Government, the CIA… and as an actual candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America. He is the living embodiment of everything we and others like us worked so long and so hard to defeat.
For the first time in my life, we cannot meet the enemy on the battlefield, we cannot meet him at the diplomatic negotiating table, and we cannot take him on in any fashion that allows us a chance of victory in the short run. And take my word for it; these people are the enemy plain and simple. They oppose us, our way of life, the very principles of our founding documents and the very core morals and ethics we govern our everyday lives by. And they look at us the exact same way.
The pendulum of public and political positioning swings from right to left in this country on average every thirty years. This is a fact. We have come to live with it and even manage to prosper as a nation despite it. And we do this because we never really move to the extreme of either side. This isn’t to say we are middle-of-the-road in our beliefs. Traditionally, we just have a very good system of checks and balances that helps us chart the road ahead. This system avoids radicalism in any form (yes, there are nut-cases at both extremes). But the deck may be stacked against us this time. Yesterday’s Flower Children are today’s Blooming Idiots… and they are in control everywhere.
And so now I and thousands of others like me are trying to forecast the coming year with the sure and certain knowledge that we may actually find our biggest challenge to be the government of the nation we love so much controlled by the enemy we worked so hard to defeat.
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