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I have been absent for almost a year from this blog, and that year has come with great learning, adversity, pain, and renewed insight. While I will not go into any of the various ill deeds and events I have waded through, I will admit that I am waking up to realities and possibilities I had chosen to ignore.

Let’s be perfectly clear. I am a 40 year old man. I am a traditional G-d fearing family man who loves his wife and family. I live according to principles I learned as a child and will eternally owe my father a debt of gratitude for, others during my young adulthood in the military as a combat paratrooper, and now in my middle age.

My father used to make me read the Book of Proverbs over and over and over. Now, as a Jew, my family calls it by its Hebrew name, Mishlei Shlomo, but it’s the same book. And I will make my kids learn it as well. Along with all the mandatory readings you see in the sidebar.

I am not a Democrat, a Liberal, a Libertarian, a Conservative, a Republican. These are titles and labels that have been abused, misaligned, and perverted to the extent that they no longer have a meaning. Not much in America’s imagery is of truth or meaning anymore. In these days, nothing is sacred. It is painful to see, and this brings sadness. Then the realization comes that all in our collective nation is a result of what we have become, and this brings deep shame.

In shame, humility extends itself to reach upwards, to a higher power that may have a name in our vocabulary, or may just be a valiant hope for a sense of social salvation.

Desperation and action soon follow.

As John Adams said:

If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave.

But this isn’t going to be a big political diatribe. There are many other things that disturb and confound me, and I would like to get a barometer on whether I’m the only one that sees it. From the little I’ve spoken to others about it, I’m not alone. I’m not the only one that seeks the truth in all matters, good or ill. Our numbers are growing as we wake up to this common state of affairs that concerns us.

We as a society appear to have lost our decency.

I remember as a child that when my family referred to my uncle, who was unmarried, as being a bachelor, it was always a hushed whisper. There seemed to be something askew about that, but what I’m taking from that is not the fact that there was embarrassment in society for those who were bachelors, spinsters, homosexuals, or otherwise not in the “My Three Sons” norm. What I find attractive was the sense of allowing privacy to the matter. It was a blatant attempt not to make that person uncomfortable or embarrassed. Now we just don’t care.

We want the dirt, we want to see how everyone else is in pain or dysfunctional, and mock that publicly, openly, without any remorse or pity. If there is salt available for the wound, we’ll make sure we rub it in as publicly as possible with a Brillo pad. We as a society treat others in a manner that our grandparents would never have allowed. Our press operates the exact same way. Journalistic standards have slipped to trash, which is pitiful considering that even in Thomas Jefferson’s time the press was bad enough for him to say, “advertisements contain the only truth to be relied on in a newspaper…”

We as a society have lost our concept of honor.

We send lawyers (I use this term loosely, not literally) to our government office to contend against lobbyists who are other lawyers that didn’t get the job, to make laws that will be enforced as beneficial to those sworn to uphold them as long as there is a mutual benefit to do so. Those among the rich that lack morals and the self-absorbed fight each other like rabid dogs in a rancid landfill for the opportunity to self indulge themselves and those who were lucky enough to connive the aforementioned to allow them to hang on the coattails.

Truth is an unnecessary currency today, and common courtesy inert. We have allowed this. We are to blame. Former President Harry S. Truman had a business with a close friend, and the plans for the partnership were made over a handshake – no documents. When the business failed, they maintained their close friendship, and over the course of a decade or so paid off every debt they owed. Still based on a handshake and word.

I wish I could be like that. As an older man with a full family, I am trying desperately to get to that kind of a man. As it stands, I know two men on this earth I would actually trust a handshake deal with and not flinch for a second. One brought me on this earth. The other was born on March 4th.

We as a society have lost common patriotic concern, and gained apathy in its place.

America is a moral, ethical entity by design. John Adams said this himself:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

It pays to be Progressive if you wish to walk numbingly and ignorantly towards a cliff that you are truly unprepared to fall off of. It pays to be a Conservative if you own an oil company, or are in the wealthy elite.

We are neither. We are people that have good hearts and good beliefs, and in general, I still hold that Americans truly want what’s best for our families, our neighbors, and all mankind. It is in our nation’s design. But we have also gotten so comfortable with not caring that we just want what fills the need at the time.

We no longer give a damn who we hurt, how we hurt them, or what it means as long as we get our placation and what we desire. Who cares, just keep feeding the bears. That’s how an undignified President gets away with babbling about “kicking ass.” Try to find anything like that in a Presidential speech or letter for our first 100 years of existence. We didn’t even flinch.

We are numb. And we have become animals with high technology.

Am I full of it? Name your surrounding neighbors by name, and the members of their families.

I can’t. I could when I was a kid in the 1970′s.

I work at a job that to me has great importance. I work for a company that provides library software, which is a valuable, critical asset. I am trying to become better at it so as not to fully embarrass my employer. My wife stays at home and tends our children. It’s not as easy for her as you’d like to believe. We have a single paycheck. I am thankful every day for that paycheck. I am thankful to my employer for that check and other benefits, and to G-d and my parents for bringing me to this earth to receive it, and my wife for putting up with me and my cranky fits.

We live within our means, we try to follow G-d’s laws as we see and understand them, and thus far things have went well.

But somehow, within extended family ranks I’m the a-hole because we aren’t consumed in a paper chase and trying to screw everyone. We have standards, and we won’t always attack those who wrong us just because we can. Nor will we tolerate dishonest garbage, and choose to disassociate from such. I try to figure how my father would handle the situation, and work according to that.

But what of society in general? Things are radically different than I recall them as a kid. I miss the Cleaver days when you could trust people. When we truly interacted together.

I dare you, look on singles sites, on social networking sites, look at all of the people that admit they are lonely. Look at the drug and alcohol addicted, look at the starving and homeless. Look into their eyes. Where is the American Dream? No Socialist, no people’s party can solve that, no conservative think tank can fix it because the problem belongs to each and every one of us.

Coach John Wooden, who passed away last week kept with him seven rules his father gave him when he graduated grammar school. Here they are:

1. Be true to yourself.
2. Make each day your masterpiece.
3. Help others.
4. Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.
5. Make friendship a fine art.
6. Build a shelter against a rainy day.
7. Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

The only part I have down is 7b, and I am working miserably on the rest.

But I care what happens, and I know you do, too. Let’s go back and hit the reset button on everything: Our values, our government, our way of conducting ourselves and everything around us. Let’s discover what this country was truly founded on. It wasn’t Jesus Christ. It wasn’t socialist antiseptic utopia, or a regime. It was freedom, privacy, common sense and decency.

There is a swirling misplacement of power and influence revolving around us that we need to break free of. At this point, we should replace every acting career politician and government official with “inexperienced” citizens that have honor, decency, and enough honesty that we have to drag them kicking and screaming to the post, as we had to do the Founding Fathers. Take the money out of the equation. Take the pensions out of the mix. Fix our education from a system of rhetoric and indoctrination to real education, like we had as children, just more with our times.

It is in our hands, beginning at the local level. We need to have these things within our local grasp, with our cities and counties responsible for the majority of our government, as designed.

My oldest son cannot name any of the Founding Fathers, and only recognized Benjamin Franklin from a list. His slightly younger brother had never heard of Bunker Hill, Nathan Hale, nor could he explain the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. Luckily he managed to know a few of Georgia’s signers, but not what they signed, or how it applied to him.

Know that the people teaching our children are scraping in every single way we are. If you don’t care, why and how can they? They have their own wars and bureaucracy to fight which distracts them from doing their jobs. We have to stop taking orders as a nation of people from culture, hyperbole, and hidden fanaticism of any form, religious, theoretical, or philosophical, and become independent respecting citizens again. We need to introduce ourselves to each other again.

I’m not saying to refrain from being G-d fearing, I’m saying to keep it at home, at your place of worship, and in your actual living activities. Church and State are set there for a very valid reason, and it applies regardless of the religion or lack thereof. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are the supreme law. If you don’t like that, then leave.

On that note, the DOJ is horribly wrong. There is such a thing as a jihadist, and such a thing as radical Islam. Here in America, we stand on the following that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Anything counter to that does not fit within our shores, and must return from whence it came. That includes Sharia Law, and political correctness that has flowed unto ignorance and insanity.

Like having a War on Terror, then awarding $400 million to a terrorist regime called Hamas, in a country that does not require (or appreciate) our aid. Aid that should go to work here, at home, where it is to be held by right, but is not.

We must wake up. We must act now. We must hope and change. But some self-intentioned opportunistic politician cannot and will not do that for us.

Let’s begin to learn where we came from.

Now.