When someone is being particularly mean and nasty, I simply think to myself, he or she used to be a cute little baby, I wonder what happened?
If we apply logic to solving our problems and add the godly principles of loving our fellow man, caring about our neighbors, and developing our God-given talents to the utmost so we become valuable to those around us – allowing these values and principles to govern our lives – then not only will we remain a pinnacle nation, we will truly be “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Totalitarianism always starts with restrictions on the rights of others. We must avoid this at all costs. George Washington even said, “If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
One way to develop courage is to consider what will happen if we fail to act.
Today we produce only 60,000 to 70,000 engineers per year, 40 percent of whom are foreigners, while China produces over 400,000 engineers per year. With this kind of technological discrepancy, we will be left far behind in the not too distant future unless we begin to address our educational shortcomings with more than political rhetoric.
God has an overall plan for people’s lives and the details get worked out along the way, even though we usually have no idea what’s going on.
Influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests.
When I entered Yale, I had to face two important facts about myself. First, though I could consider myself a smart enough person – I was not quite as smart as I thought I was. Second, I did not know how to do in-depth studying.
All citizens need to arm themselves with a basic knowledge of American history and stay abreast of current events, analyzing them with respect to history. Knowledge is power and at a time when the people are becoming increasingly impotent while the government grows larger and more powerful, it is vital that we arm ourselves with knowledge.
Similarly, if the American people and their representatives do not know and understand what is in our Constitution, others will take advantage of them. Only when we understand the law of our land can we effectively hold our representatives accountable. Knowledge is power, and we must refuse to be bullied.
Our problems are not ours alone – we share them with future generations – and we have a moral obligation to hand our nation over to our children and grandchildren in good shape.
The fact that the Republican Party in particular often seems to stand for principle, only to cave in to pressure at the last minute, has turned off a huge number of voters.
They forbid the use of the word slavery by conservatives, the mention of Nazism by conservatives, or the mention of homosexuality in anything other than a positive context, to name a few of their rules.
We also need a way to regulate the way some companies and individuals buy up patents of promising ideas that would threaten their sources of revenue.
The only reason I can imagine that it would be a good idea for government to foster dependency in large groups of citizens is to cultivate a dependable voting bloc that will guarantee continued power as long as the entitlements are provided. The problem of course is that such a government will eventually “run out of other people’s money,” as Margaret Thatcher once famously said.
There’s one more serious risk for America that I want to mention here – the risk we have created by shouting down and shutting up any discussion of faith in the public square. It’s as if we’ve decided expressions or discussions of faith shouldn’t qualify as free speech. What’s even stranger is the way it has somehow been tied to the concept of separation of church and state, even though that concept has nothing to do with people living by or publicly discussing their faith.
I am fond of saying that if two people think and say the same thing about everything, then one of them is not necessary.
I recognized others’ abilities as well. But in any career, whether it’s that of a TV repairman, a musician, a secretary – or a surgeon – an individual must believe in himself and in his abilities. To do his best, one needs a confidence that says, “I can do anything, and if I can’t do it, I know how to get help.
Some feel that it is fair for those with incomes under a certain dollar amount not to pay any federal tax. They say that these people are too poor and it would be a great burden to require them to contribute to the common pot. While I appreciate their compassion, serious problems arise when a person who pays nothing has the right to vote and determine what other people are paying.
This power became addicting to many elected officials who, instead of going to Washington, DC, for a brief time to represent their constituency, wanted to hold their positions for extended periods of time – even for life. This growing power and the progressive intrusion of government into the lives of the people was so insidious that it went largely undetected.