Is America Coming Apart? Pat Buchanan

[Teresa]

Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.

At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?

Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments on his sermon.


The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.

Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it.

"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed The Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.

Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs.

Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

read the rest of the story:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33517

[sixdogsmom]

Interesting post, thanks Teresa.

[pamsback]

For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Thing is we are NOT of a common ancestry and never were. We were never of a single faith, a single culture or a single language. We all DID worship the same God pretty much, just in different ways....People came here from ALL parts of the world, in the early days they came together while still keeping their traditions in their families, they became MORE than what they were when they got here but they never became something different. Somewhere along the way ONE facet of that patchwork quilt decided their way was the BEST way and decided they should force THEIR tradition on everybody else.......then EVERYbody got to thinkin that way out of resentment.......then you end up with what we have today.....the same patchwork quilt but the seams ain't tight because nobody is satisfied to live and let live. It takes a disaster of historical proportions to make people see that color, culture, faith etc. are all the same at the core just different interpretations.  If America comes apart it will be because of stiff necks, inability to accept people as they are, intolerance.


That practice of tolerance by ALL people would bring BACK the joy of holidays for EVERYbody whether you celebrate Christmas, Yule, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, the Winter solstice....Easter, Eostre, Ostara, or just easter bunny day....the fourth of july, cinco de mayo, beltane, halloween, samhain, ancestors day, the harvest or any one of a thousand OTHER versions of the same days. Or none of the above! The ones who don't believe in ANYthing have no more right to dictate than the ones who DO. It's the fact that any one of the above feels it is MORE important or relevant than the others that causes the hard feelings and seperation.


But that's just MY soapbox

[Diane Amberg]

Thanks, Pam.

[Warph]

Hell yes it's falling apart, Buchanan.... Pat needs to get off MS/NBC and move to Fox like most of the good jouralist are doing.

[flintauqua]

I prefer to read him, than to listen to him.  I typically agree with about 98% of what he says.  But there's always a sentence or two that I just can't swallow without further research.

Our paper is the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, but they are pretty balanced.  In addition to the local editorial staff and commentary that comes right out of the Chamber of Commerce, we have op-ed pieces from Pat Buchanan and Cal Thomas pretty regularly.  Others that appear a little less regularly are John Cass from the Chicago Tribune, Jane Musgrave and Rhonda Swan of the Palm Beach Post, Paul Krugman of the NYT, Rich Lowry of the Nationa Review, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and Tim Rutten of the LA Times.  And Maureen Dowd shows up once in a blue moon.

Charles