OT The REAL reagan

http://reagan2020.us/speeches/City_Upon_A_Hill.asp

There are three men here tonight I am very proud to introduce. It was a year
ago this coming February when this country had its spirits lifted as they
have never been lifted in many years. This happened when planes began
landing on American soil and in the Philippines, bringing back men who had
lived with honor for many miserable years in North Vietnam prisons. Three of
those men are here tonight, John McCain, Bill Lawrence and Ed Martin. It is
an honor to be here tonight. I am proud that you asked me and I feel more
than a little humble in the presence of this distinguished company.
There are men here tonight who, through their wisdom, their foresight and
their courage, have earned the right to be regarded as prophets of our
philosophy. Indeed they are prophets of our times. In years past when others
were silent or too blind to the facts, they spoke up forcefully and
fearlessly for what they believed to be right. A decade has passed since
Barry Goldwater walked a lonely path across this land reminding us that even
a land as rich as ours can't go on forever borrowing against the future,
leaving a legacy of debt for another generation and causing a runaway
inflation to erode the savings and reduce the standard of living. Voices
have been raised trying to rekindle in our country all of the great ideas
and principles which set this nation apart from all the others that preceded
it, but louder and more strident voices utter easily sold cliches.

Cartoonists with acid-tipped pens portray some of the reminders of our
heritage and our destiny as old-fashioned. They say that we are trying to
retreat into a past that actually never existed. Looking to the past in an
effort to keep our country from repeating the errors of history is termed by
them as "taking the country back to McKinley." Of course, I never found that
was so bad -- under McKinley we freed Cuba. On the span of history, we are
still thought of as a young upstart country celebrating soon only our second
century as a nation, and yet we are the oldest continuing republic in the
world.

I thought that tonight, rather than talking on the subjects you are
discussing, or trying to find something new to say, it might be appropriate
to reflect a bit on our heritage.

You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that
there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two
oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of
freedom and a special kind of courage.

This was true of those who pioneered the great wilderness in the beginning
of this country, as it is also true of those later immigrants who were
willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the
language was unknown to them. Call it chauvinistic, but our heritage does
set us apart. Some years ago a writer, who happened to be an avid student of
history, told me a story about that day in the little hall in Philadelphia
where honorable men, hard-pressed by a King who was flouting the very law
they were willing to obey, debated whether they should take the fateful step
of declaring their independence from that king. I was told by this man that
the story could be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never
researched or made an effort to verify it. Perhaps it is only legend. But
story, or legend, he described the atmosphere, the strain, the debate, and
that as men for the first time faced the consequences of such an
irretrievable act, the walls resounded with the dread word of treason and
its price -- the gallows and the headman's axe. As the day wore on the issue
hung in the balance, and then, according to the story, a man rose in the
small gallery. He was not a young man and was obviously calling on all the
energy he could muster. Citing the grievances that had brought them to this
moment, he said, "Sign that parchment. They may turn every tree into a
gallows, every home into a grave and yet the words of that parchment can
never die. For the mechanic in his workshop, they will be words of hope, to
the slave in the mines -- freedom." And he added, "If my hands were freezing
in death, I would sign that parchment with my last ounce of strength. Sign,
sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, sign even if the hall
is ringing with the sound of headman's axe, for that parchment will be the
textbook of freedom, the bible of the rights of man forever." And then it is
said he fell back exhausted. But 56 delegates, swept by his eloquence,
signed the Declaration of Independence, a document destined to be as
immortal as any work of man can be. And according to the story, when they
turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he could not be found nor were
there any who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the
locked and guarded doors.

Well, as I say, whether story or legend, the signing of the document that
day in Independence Hall was miracle enough. Fifty-six men, a little band so
unique -- we have never seen their like since -- pledged their lives, their
fortunes and their sacred honor. Sixteen gave their lives, most gave their
fortunes and all of them preserved their sacred honor. What manner of men
were they? Certainly they were not an unwashed, revolutionary rabble, nor
were they adventurers in a heroic mood. Twenty-four were lawyers and
jurists, 11 were merchants and tradesmen, nine were farmers. They were men
who would achieve security but valued freedom more.

And what price did they pay? John Hart was driven from the side of his
desperately ill wife. After more than a year of living almost as an animal
in the forest and in caves, he returned to find his wife had died and his
children had vanished. He never saw them again, his property was destroyed
and he died of a broken heart -- but with no regret, only pride in the part
he had played that day in Independence Hall. Carter Braxton of Virginia lost
all his ships -- they were sold to pay his debts. He died in rags. So it was
with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris, Livingston,
and Middleton. Nelson, learning that Cornwallis was using his home for a
headquarters, personally begged Washington to fire on him and destroy his
home--he died bankrupt. It has never been reported that any of these men
ever expressed bitterness or renounced their action as not worth the price.
Fifty-six rank-and-file, ordinary citizens had founded a nation that grew
from sea to shining sea, five million farms, quiet villages, cities that
never sleep -- all done without an area re-development plan, urban renewal
or a rural legal assistance program.

Now we are a nation of 211 million people with a pedigree that includes
blood lines from every corner of the world. We have shed that
American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in defense
of someone's freedom. Those who remained of that remarkable band we call our
Founding Fathers tied up some of the loose ends about a dozen years after
the Revolution. It had been the first revolution in all man's history that
did not just exchange one set of rulers for another. This had been a
philosophical revolution. The culmination of men's dreams for 6,000 years
were formalized with the Constitution, probably the most unique document
ever drawn in the long history of man's relation to man. I know there have
been other constitutions, new ones are being drawn today by newly emerging
nations. Most of them, even the one of the Soviet Union, contain many of the
same guarantees as our own Constitution, and still there is a difference.
The difference is so subtle that we often overlook it, but it is so great
that it tells the whole story. Those other constitutions say, "Government
grants you these rights," and ours says, "You are born with these rights,
they are yours by the grace of God, and no government on earth can take them
from you."

Lord Acton of England, who once said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely," would say of that document, "They had solved with
astonishing ease and unduplicated success two problems which had heretofore
baffled the capacity of the most enlightened nations. They had contrived a
system of federal government which prodigiously increased national power and
yet respected local liberties and authorities, and they had founded it on a
principle of equality without surrendering the securities of property or
freedom." Never in any society has the preeminence of the individual been so
firmly established and given such a priority.

In less than twenty years we would go to war because the God-given rights of
the American sailors, as defined in the Constitution, were being violated by
a foreign power. We served notice then on the world that all of us together
would act collectively to safeguard the rights of even the least among us.
But still, in an older, cynical world, they were not convinced. The great
powers of Europe still had the idea that one day this great continent would
be open again to colonizing and they would come over and divide us up.

In the meantime, men who yearned to breathe free were making their way to
our shores. Among them was a young refugee from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He had been a leader in an attempt to free Hungary from Austrian rule. The
attempt had failed and he fled to escape execution. In America, this young
Hungarian, Koscha by name, became an importer by trade and took out his
first citizenship papers. One day, business took him to a Mediterranean
port. There was a large Austrian warship under the command of an admiral in
the harbor. He had a manservant with him. He had described to this
manservant what the flag of his new country looked like. Word was passed to
the Austrian warship that this revolutionary was there and in the night he
was kidnapped and taken aboard that large ship. This man's servant,
desperate, walking up and down the harbor, suddenly spied a flag that
resembled the description he had heard. It was a small American war sloop.
He went aboard and told Captain Ingraham, of that war sloop, his story.
Captain Ingraham went to the American Consul. When the American Consul
learned that Koscha had only taken out his first citizenship papers, the
consul washed his hands of the incident. Captain Ingraham said, "I am the
senior officer in this port and I believe, under my oath of my office, that
I owe this man the protection of our flag."

He went aboard the Austrian warship and demanded to see their prisoner, our
citizen. The Admiral was amused, but they brought the man on deck. He was in
chains and had been badly beaten. Captain Ingraham said, "I can hear him
better without those chains," and the chains were removed. He walked over
and said to Koscha, "I will ask you one question; consider your answer
carefully. Do you ask the protection of the American flag?" Koscha nodded
dumbly, "Yes," and the Captain said, "You shall have it." He went back and
told the frightened consul what he had done. Later in the day three more
Austrian ships sailed into harbor. It looked as though the four were getting
ready to leave. Captain Ingraham sent a junior officer over to the Austrian
flag ship to tell the Admiral that any attempt to leave that harbor with our
citizen aboard would be resisted with appropriate force. He said that he
would expect a satisfactory answer by four o'clock that afternoon. As the
hour neared they looked at each other through the glasses. As it struck four
he had them roll the cannons into the ports and had them light the tapers
with which they would set off the cannons -- one little sloop. Suddenly the
lookout tower called out and said, "They are lowering a boat," and they
rowed Koscha over to the little American ship.

Captain Ingraham then went below and wrote his letter of resignation to the
United States Navy. In it he said, "I did what I thought my oath of office
required, but if I have embarrassed my country in any way, I resign." His
resignation was refused in the United States Senate with these words: "This
battle that was never fought may turn out to be the most important battle in
our Nation's history." Incidentally, there is to this day, and I hope there
always will be, a USS Ingraham in the United States Navy.

I did not tell that story out of any desire to be narrowly chauvinistic or
to glorify aggressive militarism, but it is an example of government meeting
its highest responsibility.

In recent years we have been treated to a rash of noble-sounding phrases.
Some of them sound good, but they don't hold up under close analysis. Take
for instance the slogan so frequently uttered by the young senator from
Massachusetts, "The greatest good for the greatest number." Certainly under
that slogan, no modern day Captain Ingraham would risk even the smallest
craft and crew for a single citizen. Every dictator who ever lived has
justified the enslavement of his people on the theory of what was good for
the majority.

We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of
aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some
of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. The lesson of Vietnam,
I think, should be that never again will young Americans be asked to fight
and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we, as
a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as
possible.

I realize that such a pronouncement, of course, would possibly be laying one
open to the charge of warmongering -- but that would also be ridiculous. My
generation has paid a higher price and has fought harder for freedom than
any generation that had ever lived. We have known four wars in a single
lifetime. All were horrible, all could have been avoided if at a particular
moment in time we had made it plain that we subscribed to the words of John
Stuart Mill when he said that "war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of
things."

The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks
nothing is worth a war is worse. The man who has nothing which he cares
about more than his personal safety is a miserable creature and has no
chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men
than himself.

The widespread disaffection with things military is only a part of the
philosophical division in our land today. I must say to you who have
recently, or presently are still receiving an education, I am awed by your
powers of resistance. I have some knowledge of the attempts that have been
made in many classrooms and lecture halls to persuade you that there is
little to admire in America. For the second time in this century, capitalism
and the free enterprise are under assault. Privately owned business is
blamed for spoiling the environment, exploiting the worker and seducing, if
not outright raping, the customer. Those who make the charge have the
solution, of course -- government regulation and control. We may never get
around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible that they can be
suckered into buying cereal or soap that they don't need and would not be
good for them, can at the same time be astute enough to choose
representatives in government to which they would entrust the running of
their lives.

Not too long ago, a poll was taken on 2,500 college campuses in this
country. Thousands and thousands of responses were obtained. Overwhelmingly,
65, 70, and 75 percent of the students found business responsible, as I have
said before, for the things that were wrong in this country. That same
number said that government was the solution and should take over the
management and the control of private business. Eighty percent of the
respondents said they wanted government to keep its paws out of their
private lives.

We are told every day that the assembly-line worker is becoming a
dull-witted robot and that mass production results in standardization. Well,
there isn't a socialist country in the world that would not give its copy of
Karl Marx for our standardization.

Standardization means production for the masses and the assembly line means
more leisure for the worker -- freedom from backbreaking and mind-dulling
drudgery that man had known for centuries past. Karl Marx did not abolish
child labor or free the women from working in the coal mines in England -
the steam engine and modern machinery did that.

Unfortunately, the disciples of the new order have had a hand in determining
too much policy in recent decades. Government has grown in size and power
and cost through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great
Society. It costs more for government today than a family pays for food,
shelter and clothing combined. Not even the Office of Management and Budget
knows how many boards, commissions, bureaus and agencies there are in the
federal government, but the federal registry, listing their regulations, is
just a few pages short of being as big as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

During the Great Society we saw the greatest growth of this government.
There were eight cabinet departments and 12 independent agencies to
administer the federal health program. There were 35 housing programs and 20
transportation projects. Public utilities had to cope with 27 different
agencies on just routine business. There were 192 installations and nine
departments with 1,000 projects having to do with the field of pollution.

One Congressman found the federal government was spending 4 billion dollars
on research in its own laboratories but did not know where they were, how
many people were working in them, or what they were doing. One of the
research projects was "The Demography of Happiness," and for 249,000 dollars
we found that "people who make more money are happier than people who make
less, young people are happier than old people, and people who are healthier
are happier than people who are sick." For 15 cents they could have bought
an Almanac and read the old bromide, "It's better to be rich, young and
healthy, than poor, old and sick."

The course that you have chosen is far more in tune with the hopes and
aspirations of our people than are those who would sacrifice freedom for
some fancied security.

Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts
coast, John Winthrop said, "We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of
all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work
we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we
shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world." Well, we have not
dealt falsely with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended from the
classroom.

When I was born my life expectancy was 10 years less than I have already
lived - that's a cause of regret for some people in California, I know.
Ninety percent of Americans at that time lived beneath what is considered
the poverty line today, three-quarters lived in what is considered
substandard housing. Today each of those figures is less than 10 percent. We
have increased our life expectancy by wiping out, almost totally, diseases
that still ravage mankind in other parts of the world. I doubt if the young
people here tonight know the names of some of the diseases that were
commonplace when we were growing up. We have more doctors per thousand
people than any nation in the world. We have more hospitals than any nation
in the world.

When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a
racial problem. When I graduated from college and became a radio sport
announcer, broadcasting major league baseball, I didn't have a Hank Aaron or
a Willie Mays to talk about. The Spaulding Guide said baseball was a game
for Caucasian gentlemen. Some of us then began editorializing and
campaigning against this. Gradually we campaigned against all those other
areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our citizenry
were being denied. We have not finished the job. We still have a long way to
go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in more
than a century.

One-third of all the students in the world who are pursuing higher education
are doing so in the United States. The percentage of our young Negro
community that is going to college is greater than the percentage of whites
in any other country in the world.

One-half of all the economic activity in the entire history of man has taken
place in this republic. We have distributed our wealth more widely among our
people than any society known to man. Americans work less hours for a higher
standard of living than any other people. Ninety-five percent of all our
families have an adequate daily intake of nutrients -- and a part of the
five percent that don't are trying to lose weight! Ninety-nine percent have
gas or electric refrigeration, 92 percent have televisions, and an equal
number have telephones. There are 120 million cars on our streets and
highways -- and all of them are on the street at once when you are trying to
get home at night. But isn't this just proof of our materialism -- the very
thing that we are charged with? Well, we also have more churches, more
libraries, we support voluntarily more symphony orchestras, and opera
companies, non-profit theaters, and publish more books than all the other
nations of the world put together.

Somehow America has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere, as
has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a Canadian journalist.
We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce the men that set
foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above us in the Skylab.
A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who
went through those years of torture and captivity in Vietnam. Where did we
find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding Fathers were
typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the
working places of our country and on the farms.

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of
the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of
Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength
and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to
the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, "The American people have a great genius
for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed
the destinies of an afflicted mankind."

We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

________________________________

This is the REAL Ronald Reagan. Obama may use some of his catch phrases,
but he will never be like him. He has a different view.

America is evil and bad in his mind, and he is indeed making it so. That is
why I have NO repsect for Nobama, and will not salute him even for the
office he fraudulently holds.

Charles Grozny, ashamed to be an American citizen since November 3, 2008,
when we elected an unqualified crooked, wicked sandpounder from Chicago as
president.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT The REAL reagan
    ... for its freedom, as well as the freedom of others and had nothing for which ... landing on American soil and in the Philippines, ... of those men are here tonight, John McCain, Bill Lawrence and Ed Martin. ... Voices have been raised trying to rekindle in our country all of the great ...
    (alt.autos.toyota)
  • Re: Reaping what you sow...
    ... presidential race. ... John H ... anybody that ran in the last election was an American. ... born in another country. ...
    (rec.boats)
  • Re: George Bush is a Joke
    ... "I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. ... friendship of another country if they have a foreign policy that can't be ... But I'm specifically dealing with the lessons of history. ... the nation and its people. ...
    (rec.sport.golf)
  • Re: The Concept of Eternal Damnation in Islam
    ... Hispanic illegals "invading" the country. ... 'American Vision'. ... Interesting thing is that it's actually immigrants ... So, in retrospect, after a little reality test, the dream may well have ...
    (alt.religion.islam)
  • Re: House Votes to Ban Permanent Bases in Iraq
    ... This bill states that it is the policy of the United States not to establish ... the President, to the Administration, to the American people, to the people ... The newspaper stated today that some Muslim ... landscape we enjoy in this country. ...
    (misc.survivalism)