In today’s America there is reason to worry about our future and generations of citizens not yet born. We live in an age where citizenship is secondary to ethnicity; where personal responsibility takes a back seat to government programs; and where Christianity is treated with suspicion and hostility.
Hurricane Katrina exposed the weakness of American. We have become dependent upon government bureaucrats. Whenever a disaster hits, we expect Washington D.C. to bail us out. Whether it is hurricanes, floods, home mortgages, automobile factories, financial institutions, or the size of our toilet bowls; the federal government is the big daddy. We can’t make a move without a government overlord giving us the okay. We are becoming just like Western Europe.
Alexis De Tocqueville wrote about this very scenario in his Democracy in America:
After all, what good is it to me to have an authority always ready to see to the tranquil enjoyment of my pleasures, to brush away all dangers from my path without my having to think about them, if such an authority, as well as removing thorns from under my feet, is also the absolute master of my freedom or if it so takes over all activity and life that around it all must languish when it languishes, sleep when it sleeps and perish when it perishes.
There are European nations where the inhabitant sees himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the place he inhabits. Major changes happen there without his cooperation, he is even unaware of what precisely has happened; he is suspicious; he hears about events by chance. Worse still, the condition of his village, the policing of the roads, the fate of the churches and presbyteries scarcely bothers him; he thinks that everything is outside his concern and belongs to a powerful stranger called the government. He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement. This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger, he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue.
De Tocqueville concludes:
When nations have reached this point, they have to modify their laws and customs or perish, for the spring of public virtue has, as it were, dried up. Subjects still exist but citizens are no more.
Magnolia Springs, Alabama has shown us the way. When the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico approached their shores; they stood up and told B.P. and the federal government to get the hell out of their way. The citizens of Magnolia Springs wasn’t about to wait around for a nod from a federal bureaucrat. The people of this town acted like Americans and took the bull by the horns and tackled the problem themselves.
When we have citizens like this, there is still hope for America.
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