My Dear Fellow Patriots:
Christmas Day is coming.
It won’t be long before I’ll be opening my eyes on that magical morning for the 60th time - a force majeur of a statistic that nudges one into a rather reflective state of mind. Right now it’s Sunday morning. My wife is on the second floor chasing one of our granddaughters, Emma; I know the game is afoot because I hear the rapid thumping of padded footsies and the squeal of delighted laughter. From both of them. This Christmas will be Emma’s third. Yesterday, Sadie was here - it will be her second.
I am sitting at the kitchen table, where I do most of my keyboard-pecking. I have a dedicated workspace upstairs, decked out in all the typical home-office accoutrements: fancy desk, hunting prints, sports memorabilia, a CD tower that is becoming rapidly obsolete, piles of files and clutter; all those things you might expect. But truth be told it is in a rather dreary corner bedroom that makes me feel cut off from the ebb and flow of things. Rather than helping me focus, it lends itself to drift and navel-gazing; besides, it hasn’t been the same room since, one-by-one, the occupants who gave it light and life left to make their own way in the world, ultimately, happily, giving us the aforementioned Emma and Sadie.
No, the kitchen is the place: the warm, beating heart of the house, and like a heart, it beckons the weary and depleted in, infuses life, and sends the healthy and rejuvenated out. It is a great place to write and reflect. About Christmas; about anything.
It is a testimony to our founders and our ancestors that when I was growing up, almost two hundred years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence, celebrating Christmas in a free and open America was the natural order of things. The rights endowed to us by our Creator were rarely pondered by us Boomers, because they were never questioned in the first place. They were rarely challenged, and if they were, the unconquerable might of the United States military, those “rough men” who stand ready to do violence on our behalf, would inevitably uphold our determination to exist as free and independent people.
Sadly, we no longer seem to live in such idyllic times; the future of those liberties has indeed come into question. And, almost unbelievably, the threat comes not from without - our military is far superior to any in the world - but from within. When Newt Gingrich says that we face the most important election in this country since 1860, he is not mouthing campaign hyperbole; we are truly fighting a battle in which the survival of our Constitution itself is at stake.
As we ponder the state of the United States come Christmas morning, 2011, we can take heart because we are engaged in a great push-back. So appalling to the American electorate was the radicalism of this President, so abhorrent were his policies, so offensive his czars, so antithetical to the American spirit his bowing and scraping to foreign potentates, so disgusting his cloying apologies for the power and greatness of our nation, that his party was soundly rejected in the 2010 elections. But that was just a 10-round fight on the undercard; the main event will take place in November of 2012, and the outcome of that brawl will determine whether or not this Christmas morning will be the last one in which you can smile at the prospects of your children - and their children - growing up in a country where every man is free, his property sacrosanct, his future liberties secure.
This will require a massive effort. It will require a coming-together of often disparate interest groups. It will require unification around an ideal - much as so many of us coalesced around the ideals of the Tea Party movement; petty squabbles be damned, we have a country to save!
There was a play - it was called the Melting Pot and it was first staged in 1908. Its protagonist was a Jewish immigrant who proclaimed:
"Understand that America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, your fifty languages, and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to – these are fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."
I say the same to you: a fig for your feuds and vendettas! We must come together if we wish to beat back the “progressivism” that threatens our free markets, buries our children under a mountain of debt, and wishes to suffocate our grandchildren under a blanket of a nanny-statism where faceless bureaucrats, devoid of any speck of American spirit, smugly dictate from a marble office paid for with the sweat of formerly-free Americans how you may live your life, what you may eat and drink, where you may travel or work and eventually, inevitably - what you must read and what you may say.
And I’m guessing that the Bible isn’t on their bookshelf, and Christmas is not in their vocabulary.
Yours in Liberty,
Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY
