Enjoy Your Memorial Day

Whatever it is you do today I hope you remember what this day is meant to commemorate. The men and women who gave everything to protect the freedoms that you hold dear…..or don’t.

It is with great sadness that I think of these brave men and women and at the same time, in my heart I know that we have failed them. We have allowed our country to fall into tyranny, it isn’t a Republican or a Democrat thing, it is a sorry thing, perpetrated by both parties in their ongoing efforts to subjugate a once great and free country.

We have slowly allowed the people who govern us to usurp our freedom, usually in the name of some great dragon they need to save us from, be it drugs, Islamic terrorists or organized crime. From RICO to the abhorrent “Patriot Act”. We are no longer the land of the free. We are: One nation under surveillance.

How can we call ourselves the land of the free when we allow our fellow citizens to be incarcerated for telling jurors that they have the right to judge the law as well as the defendant? For smoking a plant in the privacy of ones own home? and for committing other so called “offenses” that do not involve the threat to anyone’s property, life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. The “Land of the Free” has more people in jail, per capita, than any other country on earth.

I hear people talking about putting up a fence to keep people out and I am horrified, Ronald Reagan said the words “Tear down this wall” and yet the party he led wants to essentially erect our own wall, it may keep people out but it also keeps us in.

It is time we took back our country, so that the ghosts of our heroes will not be shamed by us.

I leave you with the Poem “The New Colossus” By Emma Lazarus. It is on a bronze plaque on the very symbol of freedom in this country, The Statue of Liberty

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”