HIPPIES AND THE DEBT CEILING

In the days around the horrible event at Kent State in 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen killed five students during a protest, I rounded the corner inside a building on my own college campus in California and noticed a National Guard machine gun nest at the end of the corridor. I realized in that moment my country was on the verge of violent revolution.

Since that terrible day, my generation of Americans has grown fatter, spoiled by prosperity and apathetic about the activity of its government. Meanwhile those who have assumed the reins of power in government have moved into the void, bringing with them the liberal agenda we students of the seventies fought for. In a way you could say we won the day.

Over time, the educational standards of the nation were dumbed down to the extent that basket weaving and the lot of the snail garter became compulsory concerns and readin', writin' and 'rithmatic became the illiterate drivel you see in text messages and e-mail. And with the declining devotion to excellence in America came a breathtaking fall from grace in virtually every category of global leadership by which great nations are measured.

In simpler terms, we hippies and wanna-be hippies have managed to change the status of the nearly sacred "Made in America" label into what the label "Made in China" stood for in our youth -- cheap, second-rate plastic crap.

And now, as our country teeters on the brink of economic collapse threatening to bring the rest of the world along for the ride, those liberal values continue to guide the American agenda. Congress has broken down into a playground game waged by egotistical, irresponsible, self-serving children. The welfare of the dirt beneath our feet has become more important than the survival of our own species. The patently Communist ethic of equality has replaced freedom as the nation's signature value. The concept of winning has been replaced by a trophy-for-all mentality that spits in the face of excellence. And in a spine-chilling smite to all we hold dear as a nation earned wealth is being systematically conscripted from each according to their ability to pay and distributed to each according to their need -- a behavior exactly extracted from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.

And while it is going on, suggesting the truth in public dialog has become a career-ending assertion by any public figure brave enough to suggest it; an indiscretion that must be immediately followed by an apology or paid for by removal from the public forum.

But...there is hope and so it's worth saying that the conservative values which insist upon limited government, freedom to compete without government intrusion and restraint in our spending policies -- those values that elevated America The Beautiful from wilderness to wonderland are alive and fulminating in the nostrils of patriots who will not let this nation die.

Make no mistake about it...the violence in Egypt at this moment can happen here. If and when the dollar is replaced as the monetary standard of the world and we lose our unique ability to simply print more money; which is to say … when our bills come due…on that horrible, unthinkable, unexplored hell of a day only a handful of hours will turn the peaceful protests of tea partiers into a nightmare of national shame that will make Kent State look like a game of dodge ball.

Congress -- it's not as complicated as your partisan-driven, myopic point of view suggests. Dismantle the entitlements monster, pay down the national debt, balance the budget and put incentives in place that will restore to glory the once-proud label, "Made in America," a standard the world was, once, willing to pay a premium for. And, Congress...do it now!

It doesn't matter much if raising the debt ceiling will allow us to escape for a while longer. What matters is that it will, eventually, bring us down. And anything that permits congress to continue along this dangerous path merely delays the inevitable.