I have been thinking about several things this past week and it occurred to me how far gone from integrity and honesty we have really fallen in this country as a whole. No, this is not a surprise nor a revelation that I just discovered in the past few days, but it is an evolution over the past several years that has brought us to this place in time.

Remove all the political bull from your mind for a few minutes and ask yourself honestly if this country and its government is the one you were taught to put your trust in while we were in school. Think about what this country means to you and whether your youthful understanding of what the United States once was is really what is here today.If you can read this column with an objectivity to yourself and your political leanings, then perhaps the message might be clear. Obviously if you are going to just chalk this up to a conservative point of view that means squat to your liberal philosophies you are going to miss the point.First and foremost, I was taught that we are Americans first and our heritage was always second. There were no hyphenated Americans in this country. We were one nation, a melting pot that mixed cultures and ethnicities into a heterogeneous nationality called America. Our diversity with a single minded nationalistic pride is what made us strong. America was not meant to be made up of dozens of ethnic fragments putting their individual cultures before the nation. It was to be a nation of citizens who celebrated their cultural diversity. That doesn't exist today. At least not in the sense that it did fifty years ago.Second, our Constitution gave us a right to assemble, a right to free speech and a right to practice our religion along with a right to bear arms, a right to privacy and a right to not incriminate ourselves among other things. What kind of free country banishes protests out of the eyesight of those against whom the protest is staged? What kind of behavior is that in a Republic? (That's the government not the party) Are the handlers of the government politicians with whom we disagree as a people concerned that we might upset their bosses? That is bull. It was wrong when they pushed protesters out of Bush's line of sight and it is wrong today to not show our President the degree of disillusionment we have in our government. That type of behavior occurs in dictatorships and Banana Republics not in this nation. It is offensive to the freedoms we are supposed to have.Third, the Federal government of this country lives more like elitist despots and less like democratic leaders of a Republic. The leaders in a truly elected republic are expected to live under the laws and regulations they pass, not above them. They have been living above the law for years but recently it has become more blatant and divisive. Many have used it to leverage financial advantages in the past. They allow themselves dual residences which none of us enjoy. Now they have exempted themselves from the very healthcare laws they have imposed on us and why? Because they know what the penalties are going to be for all of us by this pack of lies. They don't care because if they did they would actually read the laws before passing them and not bribe each other to get favors. This is not the America that I was taught to love.Fourth, our country was founded on a spirit of defiance, civil disobedience and individuality. For goodness sake, our founding fathers dressed as Indians and threw an entire boatload of tea into the Boston Harbor and told England to take their despotic rule and stick it where the sun sets on the British Empire. We stood in defiance against England a second time and got beaten down but in the end we prevailed. Our Navy was blown up in Pearl Harbor. We went toe to toe with dictators, fascists and megalomaniacs and defied their efforts to destroy us. We faced enormous odds in the trenches in Europe and the shores of Normandy in what most people would have believed would have been the end of America. We fought hard in the South Pacific, on the Korean peninsula, against Mexico and Spain and prevailed because we refused to capitulate to our enemies. With the attitude of today, we could be still English subjects.Where is your backbone, America? Where is your spirit of defiance? We are appeasers today. Our government receives a threat, credible or not and our response is to close down all of our embassies in the Middle East. What kind of response is that? For God's sake, we have weaponry and military might that could bring the mightiest nation to its knees. We can spot a dime from miles above the Earth with our satellites. We can attack and kill supposed terrorist leaders with drones, and you are telling me we cannot defend nineteen embassies? Where the hell is our military might? It's being dismantled and gutted from within. Our government has the nerve to spy on all of us daily, but it feels helpless to defend its embassies. What kind of message does that send our enemies?Here are messages to our enemies from the past. John Paul Jones "I have not yet begun to fight." George Patton"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't." Contrast this with our administration today which closes embassies and hides. We turn our tail and run. Where is that spirit of defiance?Abraham Lincoln said, "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." This is what our government is doing.It is legitimizing criminals, stealing our freedoms and robbing our children's legacies in the name of self-serving power. IF you are not angry yet, you should be. But start in the mirror because it is our fault we have allowed this to happen. Once you do that then it is time to tell them we have had enough. Don't stop until they listen. Register to vote and from this point forward we stop voting incumbents into office until they get the message. Call and complain. America belongs to the people, not the elitists in DC.Til next time…