Last
night I cried. I cried as I did when I buried my best friend at
Arlington – dead from the ravages of Agent Orange, I cried as I did
when I learned that most of my boot camp platoon was KIA/WIA at Hue
City, I cried because that which I love has been severely wounded.
But I realized that wounded was not killed, that here, as well as in
other pockets, there are patriots and leaders still willing to go
forward in the face of overwhelming odds to carry the flag forward.
In the parlance of my orders there was always the last specification
in the mission statement “Failure is not a mission parameter”. I
do not intend to go quietly in the dark, if this be the era of
America In Exile, then I shall be the Force Resistance.
In
the words of Benjamin Franklin, “When the people find that they
can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic,
that they can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither safety nor liberty. The Constitution only
gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it
yourself.”
Then
there are the appropriate words of Thomas Paine in Common Sense:
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in
its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an
intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same
miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without
government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish
the means by which we suffer.”
We
did not arrive at this point overnight. The Republican Party in its
present form has reaped the seeds that it has sown, and unless it
changes philosophy/direction, it will follow other political parties
into the dust of obscurity. The solution will neither be easy nor
in the short term. All incumbent political parties (with the
exception of the Carter presidency) enjoy a two term presidency, we
have the 2014 elections, then the 2016 ahead. I do not advocate
anarchy, but rather change from within the framework of the
Constitution. The web service Mega Vote
provides a means of tracking, via email, how your Senators and
Congressmen vote on anything before the House or Senate. Write or
contact your Senators and Congressmen, all of them have a web page
with a ‘Contact Me’ for or a hyper-linked email address. You
won’t get a personal reply; you’ll get a boilerplate response. I
was on staff for a General Manager, and was tasked with handling
customer complaints – the man in the corner office didn’t read or
resolve the complaints, that’s what he paid me to do…but, we
categorized them and provided complaint analysis so that trends could
be identified, investigated and resolved. Trust me – every Senator
or Congressman has a staff person who is tasked with cataloging the
subject and concern and providing Senator Foghorn Leghorn with a
summary of things he needs to be interested in.
The
powers that be have concluded that they have lost the non-white and
‘millennial’ vote, and they are scrambling around in a panic of
how to overcome that deficiency. Frank Luntz had a focus group after
the election on how the party could improve their message, and I
think the answers were almost pretty obvious. As one who spent a
great number of years in the customer contact side and trained many
CSR’s, I always had one point that I hammered into their heads –
it wasn’t in the corporate training manual until many years later,
but it was ‘Listen to what the customer is saying – do not
preconceive, prejudge, or dismiss their concern, but listen, repeat
the problem/question back so that they feel that you are concerned,
then become the single point of contact (even if you must pass it off
to another group – don't shuffle the customer around, become that
person's solution). Where the campaign guru's failed in the second
debate was on the first question when the man asked him about a job –
Romney didn’t come back with what kind of a job were the looking
for, what qualifications they had, didn't 'personalize' the man, he
launched into his talking points. Later after the debate that man
was asked about how he felt and while his answer on camera was
non-committal, it was obvious Romney didn’t sway him.
In
closing, to quote Benjamin Franklin again, when asked what kind of
government the convention had decided on, his reply was “A
Republic, if you can keep it”
– I intend to keep it.