WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?

By Charlie Daniels

The Charlie Daniels Band
October 18, 2013

I am seriously concerned with the place our nation is right now and even more seriously concerned about where it is headed.

It seems that part of the people care about what's happening, part don't care and a large part doesn't know and don't want to know.

Any thinking person who loves their children and grandchildren has to stop and consider the disaster this generation is passing on to them. I say this generation, knowing that preceding generations had a lot to do with our plight, but we as the generation in charge when the tipping point came, are the last generation that had a chance to do anything about it before the international train wreck happens and it seems that we, at least a majority of us, have chosen to keep our heads under the cover hoping the monsters will be gone when we come up for air.

Of course that's not going to happen and as much as it goes against the eternal optimist in me to say it, I fear… no, I'm convinced that the United States of America will shortly find our collective testicles in a pair of vise grips and our feet bogged down in knee deep mud.

Our current economic policies are just impossible to sustain and as the debt explodes, the dollar decreases in value, the entitlement rolls grow and America is encouraged to become more and more dependent on a monolithic central government, we will never pull out of our self induced nose dive before our fiscal plane crashes to the ground.

Having said that - and by the way, for the benefit of you cherry pickers, I fervently hope I'm wrong - I got to wondering what thing, or combination of things, brought us to this sorry state of affairs.

One of my first vivid memories is the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the reassuring fatherly voice of president Franklin Roosevelt telling us that we had nothing to fear but fear itself and a nation ill prepared for war got it's dander and it's hackles up and with the help of our allies, went forth to save the world from fascism and imperialism and soundly defeated Japan and Hitler's Nazis.

America was committed to winning the Second World War and the citizens of this nation bore the sacrifices and worked a little harder and their commitment to the war effort was tenacious and deep and America united is an immovable object, a juggernaut, stoppable only by Almighty God, and it seemed He blessed our efforts.

Then once the bombs stopped falling that old butcher Joseph Stalin resumed his mission of making earth a communist planet and again America came together with a sustained effort that outspent, out maneuvered and outlasted the formidable Soviet Union and eventually brought the regime that Ronald Reagan called an "evil empire" to its knees.

But in my mind the distrust and disillusionment of America truly began in earnest with the Korean War, a war which the politicians refused to call a war, but a police action, a conflict the American people never fully understood.

However noble the reason for the Korean War, which I'm content to leave to the historians, they were never completely explained to the people who only saw the casualty lists and wondered when it would ever be over, not truly comprehending why it was necessary to spill American blood in a nation where we could not pursue the enemy into their strongholds and basically had to fight this " police action" by the rules of the enemy.

Then came Vietnam the most divisive period since the Civil War separating generation from generation, blurring the lines between right and wrong, justice and persecution and for the first time in history motivating misguided young men to burn their draft cards and leave the country to avoid military service, and changing social mores forever.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Watergate, the taking of the Iranian Embassy and America's seeming disability to do anything about it all added to the frustration and loss of faith.

Then there was the heartbreak of 9/11 and the emergence of a new and determined enemy we have never faced and the country's lack of deviousness it will take to successfully confront and defeat them.

The continued exponential expansion of the entitlement class, the badly botched foreign policy, the lying of presidents, the arrogant power of an administration that has little or no respect for the constitution, the mystery and doubt caused by Obamacare, the unimaginable national debt and America's uncertain economic future have combined over the years to undermine trust and unity and without those this nation is not going to survive.

The answer, and there is one, although the likelihood is that the kind of measures we need can never survive the vote of the, soon to be a majority entitlement class. A nation's lasting greatness is in its people and when they are disillusioned the nation eventually comes apart at the seams.

We need strong, honest leaders who have the guts to make America face the realities of what we have done to ourselves and the austere and painful measures we must take to straighten it out, no sugar coating, no mincing words, just the unvarnished truth.

Uniters not dividers, leaders with the charisma and confidence to inspire the shattered confidence of an ailing nation, to instill the desire to return to the glory days of being the undisputed military, economic and political leader.

Leaders who have the courage to identify and confront our enemies, reassure our allies, give breaks to manufacturers who make their products in America and prove wrong the loud and radical groups who say our natural resources can't be harvested without endangering the environment.

Are such leaders available? I truly don't know, but I'm going to keep on praying for them to appear.