Remembering When America Felt Like Home

Even with the all challenges of childhood, the parental control, (all for our own good, of course), and the authority that we were under at school, our lives still once felt very much intact. We felt safe, secure and free. America was a different place than it is today.

I grew up in the era of anti-establishment sentiment, anti-Vietnam marches and anti-war rhetoric at college. I remember holding a small white candle in a dark college room where we mourned and stood in silence honoring the four students senselessly murdered by soldiers at Kent State on that tragic day.

I saw leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. shot down. I waved at Bobby Kennedy as he went past me on a California street only to see him shot down two weeks later. America was not always a wonderful place but then again, it was.

Among all those periods of chaos, America had a different “feel” to it. America, even with all its unpredictability, held a strange sense of predictability. America felt like “home”.

Days were filled with music as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan showed us that magic could come from six strings. Later the birth of MTV opened up the world of video and wonderfully it was more than the scantily clad vixens, raw sex and gangster rap that assaults the senses of anyone who tries to watch it today.

The Beatles Magic Mystery Tour exposed us to visions and lyrics never before shared on vinyl, of which is not even a memory for the youth of today. Short-lived eight track tapes and cassette tapes have given way to Cds and DVDs demonstrating progress although some of today’s music of raw noise and screamed lyrics are a waste of the plastic it is recorded on.

Today, America feels like a foreign country, one into which I was thrown without my permission. With all its dangers and insanity, I can’t tell anymore which way is up and which way is down. Perhaps it is because the ways I once considered “down”, ways of Communism, socialism, Marxism, oppression, and political abuse are suddenly being unashamedly proclaimed as the road we should travel.

The people we once reviled and pointed to as the insane madmen we should fight to oust, are suddenly held in high regard by those in power in our own government and even in the White House. Radicals and self-proclaimed Communists surround our president as they lift high the praise of Chairman Mao, “Uncle Joe” Stalin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Che Quevara. What once was down is now considered the way up.

America was built out of an uninviting wilderness into a nation of promise, wealth, opportunity and high ideals. It was founded on a freedom of religion and free speech and individual rights. That was the way up from tyranny that we chose. And now we are finding those in power saying that way is out-dated and needs to be “changed” into another.

Freedom of religion has become freedom FROM religion. Christianity is scoffed at while Islam is even taught in some schools under the guise of learning tolerance. Too bad tolerance of Christianity isn’t worth promoting. Freedom of speech seems only protected when it promotes pornography, sexual perversion or the same political views as those in power. All other voices are deserving of being stamped out in the name of civility.

Political Correctness is a disease that stops every effort to expose what is wrong in this country. The “City on the hill” is under attack. Its walls are being torn down and its very foundations dug up and relegated to the dustbin of useless history. The way we always saw as “up” is now considered the way down.

The adage that “you cannot step into the same river twice” makes us realize that things do change. But the changes being forced upon us today are not signs of progress but of regression, not of promise but hopelessness, not of a move forward but a rapid move backward toward oppression, control and tyranny. Our freedoms are in jeopardy. Our liberties are being taken away almost daily without even an apology or reasonable excuse.

The Constitution is very specific as to the rights afforded us as people but liberal judges and the current president and all that surround him seek to rewrite it. Will our grandchildren even know the greatness of the country that changed the world?

We fled the narrow, limited existence that held such misery for us and created an America where we could rid ourselves of such wrongs. And now, as we have chosen not to remember that history of struggle, we are being led headlong back into that darkness which we fought and many died to escape from.

That wonderful land we were born into is fading in the mist of uncertainty. The challenges today are greater and the dangers more threatening than ever before. But the America I remember could always find a way to stand tall above it and find our way home again.

How did we get to the place where so many feel America needs to be totally transformed? How did we get to the place where we excitedly elected a man to the presidency whose main goal is to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”, using Barack Obama’s own words that he spoke with enthusiasm, arrogance and pride?

When did America begin not to feel like home anymore? Regardless of the answer to that question of when, we do hope in our hearts that somehow we can find our way home again. The path may be cold and overgrown with weeds but maybe, just maybe, we can still find it buried under the weedy distractions. Maybe we can clear the way enough for us to follow it back to where we were destined to remain.

As a matter of life and death, America needs to make its way home to its roots and once again build on the foundations that made it great in the first place. If we cannot, nothing else matters.