Many Americans see today’s progressives just as they have presented themselves over the years: forward thinking; out on the leading edge, visionary.
That positive image of course is why the word progressive was chosen. But that word has another, far more sinister meaning.
Parkinson’s.
Multiple sclerosis.
Lou Gehrig’s.
Names that strike fear.
*Progressive diseases.
*
**Diseases that start small—you don’t even know you have them. But month-by-month, year-by-year, the disease gets stronger and you get weaker—and then weaker still. And then you die.
**
***Progressive diseases.
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****America has one of those.
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***Long before any of us were born into this wonderful, welcoming place, the seeds of her destruction were already planted.
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***It started back in the late 1800s. America was a free market powerhouse. Not perfect by any means, but the place where everybody in the world wanted to come. And come they did. And with them came a new and radical ideology. A new way of seeing a society. A new vision for the future. A value system that had no respect for law, no fear of God and to whom the constitution was merely an outdated inconvenience—to be paraded out when it serve their purpose and ignored when it didn’t.
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***They brought with them a populist message that played well with voters, as long as voters didn’t think too deeply. And too often voters don’t think too deeply. And they knew that.
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***Advanced, they called themselves. Forward thinking. Smart. Caring, they said. More feeling. More evolved. More compassionate. ‘Progressive’ they called themselves.
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***Little did they know how right they were.
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****A progressive disease starts with just a few cells in a body full of healthy, vital, life-sustaining cells. And one by one those original cells are co-opted and either killed or turned, until ultimately the disease has its way.
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***This new idea picked up pace in what we now call the progressive era, and ever since has, well…progressed.
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***Cell-by-cell, person-by-person it has worked its way into America’s vital organs: education, the media, unions—even political parties.
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***Cell-by-cell, person-by-person it has supplanted traditional values and today stands at the threshold of owning the body.
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***It’s a radical transformation, focused not on the creation of a nations wealth but the ‘just division’ of that wealth. It’s a transformation that seeks to replace individual decision making with an elitist group-think from a power center thousands of miles away; a transformation that shrinks the military, expands dependency and mocks the miracle of the constitution; a transformation that leaves the country weakened and vulnerable to outside forces; a transformation leading America down a path which too often ends in tyranny, poverty, violence and in a couple of cases, the death of millions.
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****A body doesn’t willingly give into the progressive disease. It resists. It fights with everything it has—with everything it has left, at least.
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***In America today those original cells, those people untouched by the progressive disease, are denigrated and labeled: Deplorables, they are called. Groupies. Trumpers. Uncaring. Less compassionate. Less moral.
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***These are people who have not succumbed to the new ideology. They have not caught the new vision, but still see America as it was: strong, proud, prosperous and free.
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***More than anything else, free.
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***Individuals freely making their own decisions. Shaping their own lives. Self-reliant. Creating goods and services. Freely trading those goods and services at a modest profit in a market free of external forces; free of burdensome rules; free of onerous taxation.
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***Free.
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***And there is good news. These people are still out there resisting; fighting for that vision; fighting for their country—for their way of life. Good people, moral people, strong people, compassionate people. Praying, going to meetings, writing letters, standing along the streets waving signs, doing everything they know how, to say, “Wake up America! Wake up America!”
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***“Wake up!”
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***But there’s bad news too.
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****The progressive disease almost always wins. The body dies and with it die those millions of healthy cells. As the body dies, of course the dreams die too—along with its potential—all that it could have been, should have been, indeed would have been but for the ravages of that progressive disease.
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***If we lose America, the world loses America—for all of time.
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***How could we willingly throw away this treasure that we so freely inherited? How could we do that to our children—to the world?
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***How?
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*****Epilogue
*****
*****On a bright fluffy-clouded spring morning, in an obscure corner of this vast land, in the smallest of white-picket-fence towns, a child crosses the street, her little hand gripped safely in her father’s.
*****
*****Wondering eyes look up as she asks, “Daddy, does it have to be that way?“
*****
*****“What is it, darling?”
*****
*****“I heard you and mommy talking. Does it have to be that way? Does the disease have to win? Always? Will it?”
*****
*****“Sweetheart,” he replies, softly breathing in a deep, desperate breath, “I wish I knew. I want to say no, but honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that one-by-one, person-by-person, vote-by-vote, Americans will soon decide.”
