“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: Its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas then America will collapse from within.” Joseph Stalin

America as we have known it is on the verge of total collapse. It is doubtful that the Republic we once knew, where men were free and willing to work hard in pursuit of their dreams and to secure lives of autonomy will ever return. In its place we find a shattered nation where a narrow majority now live lives of comfortable mediocrity, benefiting from a failed welfare state where the initiative to better one’s self is destroyed due to a fear of losing needed resources. Everything has been redefined to the point that there is a raging debate as to whether or not a man who feels like a woman should be able to share a restroom with our daughters, and freedom of speech now means denying others their freedoms in acts of outright violence because someone hurt someone else’s feelings. How did this happen? How did we get to this point where people are literally begging the government to trample on our liberties in order to gain security? The very idea of freedom itself has been turned upside down and employed against us as a weapon; and sadly, few noticed because we were too busy having fun while ignoring the consequences.

The question of what it means to be free will inspire many different answers while also demanding we definitively answer it. How we choose to define liberty will certainly shape the future of America just as how we have defined it over the past several decades has brought us to where we are now. To some, freedom means living a life where we are free from the consequences of our actions and responsibility is for someone else to take. Today, we see the catastrophic consequences of this thinking as young people demand those that have worked their whole life give up what they have earned in order to take responsibility for decisions they didn’t make.  To others, freedom is the exact opposite. It means having unrestricted freedom but also being free to learn from our mistakes, being free to accept the responsibility of our actions so that we may learn to become better men.  Michael Savage once told a story about a father and son watching a bird hatch from its egg. The child, watching the baby bird struggle from its shell insisted that they help the bird free itself. The father told the son that if they did it would die because it needed to learn the struggle in order to survive. Well, there it is. Man is meant to struggle as well, and at the end of our struggles we emerge stronger, more capable than we were before.

Some would argue that we are in that struggle now. Our nation is crumbling around us and instead of accepting responsibility and taking up the work of fixing it ourselves; we are looking to others to do it for us. We spend our days blaming everybody else for what is happening without stopping to think for a moment that maybe, just maybe we have the leaders we deserve. In The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins, Batman had become a villain even though he was a hero. He was a hero that the people of Gotham deserved, a dark figure operating in the shadows. This is because the people of Gotham had allowed themselves to be corrupted to the point where they would allow a dark shadowy figure to carry out justice in their name. In America, we have corrupted politicians that are virtually ignored by the vast majority of society. A society that has allowed its spirituality, morality and patriotism be undermined to the point of corruption that is. In America, a nation supposedly steeped in Christian values we have skyrocketing divorce rates, men abandoning their children, one in five are on psychotropic drugs, illegal drugs run rampant, people lust for money, married couples engage in corrupted sex practices, pornography sites are the most visited on the internet, prayer has been abandoned in public schools, people routinely murder their unborn children in the name of civil rights and people live the majority of their lives in a trance, enthralled by the hypnotism of the entertainment media and yet, we wonder why we face such a struggle.  These are the consequences of allowing freedom to be redefined without the need of responsibility.

This is what Joseph Stalin meant when he said America would collapse from within if its spirituality, morality and patriotism could be undermined.  The only problem is; we allowed it because we were having fun.

It is up to us to fix our country, not Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. In order to make things right we have to do some serious reflecting. We have to endure the uncomfortable struggle of realizing the role we all played in our own downfall. We are all guilty at some level of alleviating our responsibility of maintaining liberty and passing along a better nation to our off spring. This is certainly truer for some than others; however, we all know that if we want to make a better world we start by being the change we want to see. By allowing other men to control the reigns we are foregoing the necessary struggle to come out of this a better, stronger nation. We have to go through the struggle of accepting responsibility, making a change in our own lives first and then holding those that wish to govern us accountable for their corruption. If we continue to allow others to define liberty for us, and placate us with platitudes while dangling a carrot in front of our faces our fate will be no different than the bird that dies because it didn’t learn how to survive a struggle. America, the challenge before us was given for a reason. The very resolve of mankind is being tested and rising to the occasion to restore integrity and truth to our nation is the defining struggle of our time. We either face our selves and take the responsibility or, we are through as a nation, no matter who is elected.