​Given her very impressive silver screen acting career, there is no doubt but that Meryl Streep earned her “Lifetime Achievement Award.”  But her acting in Hollywood’s make-believe world, in which one can be shot dead, then get up and walk away, is irreversibly different from, say, Kate Steinle getting shot dead in San Francisco.
 
Meryl Streep would do well to learn the difference of her play-acting world from the real world and stop using the stage to “act out” her progressive aggression against America’s President-Elect Donald Trump.

President Obama’s “red line” drawn in the sand of Assad’s Syria, is now the flat line that was the heartbeat of the people of Aleppo.
 
How’s that working for your “legacy,” Mr. President?

​So, citizens of the world of “modernity,” what do you think of the boxer shorts used to cover the nude statues at Rome’s Campidoglio Museum, in deference to the seventeenth century sensibilities of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani?  By the way, whatever happened to the sovereignty of the cultural etiquette:  “When in Rome….”?

​Those who do not want boots on the ground will be grounded in the graveyard of Boot Hill with their boots on.

​Those who keep themselves informed of the “mainstream media’s” political propaganda will know that it portrays the Republican Party as the villain in our two-party system.  The objective of its unremitting malice and endless press attacks is to brow-beat the Republican Party into a sense of guilt about its conservative values.  Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has not only bought into the psychology of that Stockholm syndrome ploy, it confesses its “guilt” by practicing the losing proposition of “compassionate conservatism,” which leads, inevitably, to compromise and defeat.  Whenever, wherever and on whatever issue the Republican leadership has “crossed the aisle” to make deals with the Democrats, the Republican Party has always gotten the ordeal end of the deal.

     What do political declarations such as “You didn’t build that,” “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs,” “There is nobody in the country who got rich on their own,” etc., have in common?  They are variants of the same philosophy – socialism – and they are full-throated assertions made in public by the progressive leadership of the Democratic Party.  Back in 2008, such comments would have doomed Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency of the United States.  Indeed, when some Republicans even hinted that he might be a socialist, an entourage of his defenders rushed in to shelter him behind a barricade of denials.

     But that was 2008 and this is 2015.  The difference of now from then is that, during his six years in office, President Obama has accelerated this country’s slow drift into socialism up to the speed of fast-forward.  He has hooked “the masses” on the “opiate” of “free stuff,” for which they have traded their votes and turned over the upkeep of themselves to the government – exactly like the entitlement addicts of Greece.  He has accomplished the objective of his mission statement – to “fundamentally change America” – with such unopposed ease that many who previously hid their political preference for socialism are now gladly “outing” themselves as “comrades” and “fellow travelers.”  There is no doubt about it, President Barack Obama has made socialism “fashionable” in America.

     The socialism that Obama envisions for the United States is not the “soft socialism” of Denmark, Norway or Sweden, but rather, the sweeping, draconian socialism of Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin.  The president’s objective today is the same as was theirs back in the days of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which is to inflict the finality of death upon “competitive capitalism” and empower government to enforce the new social order of “cooperative collectivism.” 

     Over the years, I have defended the founding principles of our Constitution, individualism and self-responsibility, against socialist collectivism and its insistence that it is the societal obligation of every citizen to be his fellow-citizen’s “keeper.” The indictment I bring to bear against that concept is the evidence of history which shows that wherever it was enforced, sooner or later, the population thereof was reduced to the status of serfs and subjected to a grueling lifetime of forced labor.  In that regard, you will recall Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, masters of “the masses,” were infamous for driving the peasants of Russia like beasts of burden. 

     Bernie Sanders is a rabid progressive Democrat, running to be tyrant of the United States of America come 2016.  Sanders is so far “left” that only Karl Marx could be to the left of him.  In a revealing moment, one of his admirers explained her support for him as follows, “I just believe people are more open to helping each other out.”  Mind you, we are not talking here about the niceties of neighborly concern or voluntary assistance.  The subject here, of “…helping each other out,” is about the forced obligation of man to be his “brother’s keeper.”

     The socialist concept of man as his “brother’s keeper” is NOT about “compassion.”  It is a façade of caring, beneath which lurks the malevolent concept of the ownership of man by man – the ownership of man by government, as it were.  Inevitably, in the final manifestation of its evolvement, socialism always materializes as a chain gang society in which “we the people” are shackled – one to the other – in a collectivist “brotherhood” of coerced interdependence.
 

*****

SELF-RESPONSIBILITY

From totally enclosed,
To totally exposed,
Then severed from plural to one.
When ends the umbilical attachment,
Responsibility for self is born.

The mind is the laboratory of human thought, wherein the diverse content of one’s experience is integrated to form a body of knowledge.  Speech is the mind’s messenger.  It gives voice to the silent thinking carried on in every head and makes the findings audible for all the world to hear.  If we did not have speech with which to render the conclusions of our thinking available for public consumption, we could never compile the knowledge from which civilization is advanced.
    
To grasp some measure of the knowledge fitted together with the bits and pieces of information collected from the interactive input of our social co-existence, we need only to recall that just yesterday, so to speak, we were earth-bound, cave-dwelling Neanderthals in need of all the necessities of self-preservation.  The ultimatum imposed upon us by the law of nature was unforgiving and non-negotiable:  Save yourselves or perish.  So, equipped with just the head on our shoulders and a stick with a sharp-edged stone strapped to the end of it, we set out to secure the means of our continuance.  Today, our footprints are impressed upon the surface of the moon, documenting our arrival as interplanetary travelers and certifying our competence to succeed against the odds.
    
In the interim – between getting ourselves from the cave to the moon – we improved every aspect of living in “organized society.”  We figured out the science of transforming the raw materials of nature into the consumer-serving products that have contributed so significantly to the betterment of a human lifetime.  We upgraded our cavern habitats to marvelous architectural dwellings.  We captured lightning and plugged the world into electricity.  We siphoned oily ooze up from the belly of the earth and, with it, gave the machinery we built the power of locomotion.  We transplanted organs from one person into the body of another.  We mixed an endless combination of medicinal compounds defensive against disease and restorative of good health.  We kept the “horn of plenty” overflowing with a surplus of “consumer goods,” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
    
The power of open communication for good is demonstrated everywhere around us.  All of the above achievements – including the etceteras – are benefits of the unfettered mind and its delivery system, freedom of speech.  None of the society-advancing creations itemized could have been brought into existence during the ages when speech was “officially repressed.”  When, “on pain of death,” thinkers were forbidden to advance any explanation contrary to the status quo, nothing much different from the status quo was accomplished.  Thus, the stagnation of sameness was repeated for hundreds of years – and on. 
    
Are we headed back to from whence we came?  Well, observe that right now, in America, the birthplace of the First Amendment, freedom of speech is being relentlessly vilified as “hate speech.”  The vocabulary cops are everywhere, eavesdropping on every word that rolls off the tongue, listening for any opposing opinion that they can deliberately misrepresent as “politically incorrect.”  Their menacing pressure group tactics have succeeded in intimidating many conservatives who, out of fear of being branded racist, sexist, homophobic, and such, now hide their true opinion in a hush of silence – an omen that bodes ominous for the future of freedom in America.
    
The motive for repressing speech today is exactly the same as in ages past – to bestow “absolute power” upon the political puppeteers of human behavior.  In the present case, those puppeteers are the progressives of the Democratic Party, whose authoritarian mindset is spreading across the political landscape of America like a virus gone pandemic. 
    
When, in 1791, America’s forefathers ratified the First Amendment, they empowered every succeeding generation of Americans with the most formidable armament ever against the totalitarians of absolute power – the right of freedom of speech.  It is imperative that we deploy that armament and not allow the progressives of the Democratic Party to bridle our tongues.  Opine out loud, conservatives.  Let us be the voice of the First Amendment.