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by Dr. Carl Mumpower
Op-Ed
Asheville Citizen-Times
July 31, 2007
Recently,
at a gathering of partisans concerned with drug harm in their neighborhoods, I
chanced upon a partially obscured black and white picture on a high
bookshelf. A glimpse pressed me to reach
for the past – it was quickly apparent that I had stumbled upon something
precious. The framed photo was of a
group of black male and female adolescent students in formal dress. Their time was the mid-fifties, but it was
evident that they were living in a community that was building children of
character faster than the nonsense of racism could tear them down. Those faces beamed hope, identity, and
values. Absent were today’s hip hop cultural
message of females as walking sex toys and men as predatory little boys. The implication of the photo was stark – we
have lost ground with our children and many others in a culture in decline.
Paralysis
abounds in a society sidestepping social security problems, health care, our
addictions to legal and illegal drugs, and a host of other essential issues
that herald the impotence of a culture loosing its way. A clear indicator of this regression is the
fact that our elected officials actually debate the right of citizens of other
countries to freely violate our borders and find work with employers equally
willing to mock our laws.
Liberal
Justice Louis Brandeis once offered that, “Government teaches the whole people
by its example. If the government
becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to
become a law unto himself.” This
visionary was speaking to the harmful potentials of a form of cultural
terrorism where men are compelled to selfishness by a society abandoning its
commitment to the rule of law. As local
and state governments sit passively by or respond in kind, Congress swamps
America with a deluge of laws that are, once passed, are arbitrarily enforced
with a passion reserved for that which is convenient, comfortable and often
meaningless. If the people had courage,
they should be asking us all, including yours truly, to resign for our
obsession with the trivial over the essential.
Our
unrestricted borders have propelled us beyond the nourishing rain of measured legal
immigration by those able to uplift America to a damaging flood of those
willing to use America. Both governing
parties have historically evaded real action on this issue. One undermines our standard of living by artificially
retraining wages through a migration of an underclass accustomed to poverty. The other party grins at the opportunity to
embrace illegals as mascots in much the same way they have seduced other’s
loyalties with the hollow promises of entitlements. Both parties, operating under differing motivations,
are bonded in their disturbing comfort with selling our children’s tomorrows
for selfish agendas today.
It
remains that American cannot solve the worlds social and economic problems by
absorbing the masses of people poorly supported by the corruptions of their own
governments and deteriorating cultures. We
don’t help them if we surrender our heritage and join them. What we can do is what we have done with
success for over 200 years – fight for our culture’s survival and serve as a
glowing beacon of liberty, opportunity, and responsibility that can be duplicated
regardless of where a man is planted.
It was Plato who
noted that, “The price that good men pay for being indifferent to public
affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
Evil comes in all guises, and if we are to stem the tide of our
culture’s erosion, it is important that we step around complacency and into the
winds of our time…
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