This I Believe Revisited

By T.L. HEADLEY, MBA, MA, BA
Many years ago, the great newsman Edward R. Murrow wrote an op-ed entitled “This I Believe…” in response to what he perceived as the threat to this nation posed by the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism.
In the interest of context, here is an extract from that piece…

“We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all—now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog—there is an enveloping cloud of fear.
“There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt—doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging.
“It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he has no real idea how long a lease he has on the future. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice—and those thoughts we aren’t interested in—people don’t speak their beliefs easily or publicly.” Edward R. Murrow

I have been thinking a lot about this piece recently. It seems some folks would like to sit in their homes and pretend they can hold the hand of the devil and still gain entrance to heaven.
What do I mean by this?
Very simply, we have come to another “time of choosing” as Ronald Reagan said – a time to realize that we cannot live by the old rules. We must make a choice and live with the consequences of that choice. Our nation’s future is at stake. As Reagan said….

“Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer — not an easy answer — but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
“We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender.
“Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face — that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand — the ultimatum.
“You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin — just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
“You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, ‘There is a price we will not pay’ “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this — this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits — not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
‘You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
‘We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
‘We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.” Ronald Reagan

This is no longer a choice between Republican and Democrat – we no longer have that luxury to play the old game. This is a choice between freedom and slavery, between right and wrong, between the children of light and the children of darkness.
There is no longer a Democratic Party or a Republican Party… there are only those who support Obama and those who oppose the creeping socialism he is imposing. There are only those who are willing to accept the wholesale shredding of The Constitution and the Bill of Rights and those will are not willing to see that happen. There are only those who are content to live in subservience to the State and those who believe in the inherent value of the individual. And there are only those who will stand up for the right and those willing to impose and institutionalize the “orthodoxy of the wrong.”
The modern-day national Democratic Party bears no resemblance to the party my father supported for most of his life. It has been infiltrated and taken over by socialists and others who would have us become the evil we fought against in Vietnam and Korea and countless other places. They will tolerate no dissent – no difference of opinion. They are determined to impose their agenda at any expense.
The modern-day Republican Party is facing the same threat – from a group that seeks to impose a “new orthodoxy” of libertarianism that borders on the libertine – pushing aside the social values of life and responsibility in favor of radical individualism, yet not an individualism based on the inherent value and goodness of man, respectful of differing opinions, but rather one based on extreme isolation – not just of the nation but of the soul – with an almost Taliban-like demand for adherence to every letter of their definition of “conservative orthodoxy.”
Taken together, our nation faces the greatest threat it has in generations. As I have said before, we are no longer “we.” We are no longer “one nation” – but instead we have become a nation of “created minorities.” We are African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Anglo-Americans, etc, etc, etc…. we are men, women, gay and straight, “oldsters” and “millenials.” Even these are not good enough, we are further split into “white Hispanics” and “black Hispanics” – labels imposed by those who seek to divide and master rather than unite and lead.
The result is a nation divided more deeply than any time in the past 140 years – a nation on the verge of destruction.
So we are at a time of choosing.
And at this time of choosing, I revisit Murrow’s “This I Believe…” to make this clear statement.
I am a conservative Republican. I am a white, college-educated, male , Anglo-American, Christian who holds firmly to the traditional values of classical liberalism. Confused? You shouldn’t be. Classical “liberalism” believed in the innate value of the individual, in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas , and equally in the free and unfettered marketplace of commerce. Classical “liberalism” believed in individual rights but also in individual responsibilities – in freedom bounded only by our responsibility before God to be “… our brother’s keeper.” And classical liberalism believed that “government is best which governs least.”
There was a time when Americans held strongly to that conviction as a people – ONE people united in the idea that we can be a “shining city on a hill” standing as a beacon to a world in darkness of the way man can live together in peace and prosperity.
We have allowed ourselves to be led far down the road to slavery – far down the road to allowing that lamp of liberty to be extinguished. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Today we stand at the last fork in the road. Do we choose to take the long and painful road to rebuilding our nation and our promise, or do we stay on the road we are on – the road into the dark forest of despair?
Yes, we face again .. “a time for choosing.”
What choice will YOU make?