I lived the first eight years of my life in a totalitarian hellhole.
I was born in Romania, during the waning years of Soviet Union rule over Eastern Europe. Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his merry band of thugs, and cruel and inept bureaucrats, ran Romania. Ceaușescu would eventually be shot to death by firing squad on Christmas Day of 1989, along with his wife. But before that, my parents exhausted a lot of resources and energy trying to leave Ceaușescu’s socialist utopia. My dad even tried defecting. But he failed. Twice. And both times he was thrown in prison for months at a time.
Eventually, however, after much bureaucratic finagling and help from Stateside family, the Dragus made it to the United States. One of my earliest American memories is of my parents coming back from the A & P grocery store in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Their faces shone as they spoke excitedly about the amazing thing that was the American grocery store. You can get anything at the grocery store, they relayed to their four children. Anything! Dad repeated, waving around a banana, a cheek-to-cheek grin stretching his face. That was my first time seeing a banana.
In America, you can get anything you need, and anything you don’t. You can buy any food you want anytime you want it (although this could change if the New World Order aspiring technocratic rulers have their way). Historically, this has been the land of plenty. Some like to argue this is the land of too much because we are so wasteful and because we make and buy so many dumb things. Foam hats come to mind.
In Romania, people stood in line for bread, meat, and milk. Because if they didn’t, they’d have none of those things. They also stood in line for kerosene rations. And the government would periodically turn off the hot water and heat. But there was no line they could stand in in order to alleviate that problem.
The reason Romanians had so little and Americans so much hardly had anything to do with the availability of natural resources or human capital. Romania, before the societal cancer of communism infected the world, was a regional breadbasket. Both countries have had an abundance of natural resources and people capable of hard work. The difference was that one was a collectivist abyss and the other was built and effectively operated on principles of individual liberty, self-rule, and laisse-faire capitalism.
Romania was ruled from the top down by statist bureaucrats who imposed their corrupt and incompetent influence on all aspects of society. They not only controlled the nonelected government, but production, the media, and even mainstream churches. And they terrorized and coerced people with a ruthless little army of secret police jackboots.
In America, however, and more so in the past than today, people were generally free. Americans worshipped freely, spoke freely, moved about freely, and created freely. In America, the free market had preeminence. If there was demand, someone produced it and no bureau of corrupt and ignorant state officials got in the way. Even if it was something really dumb. Like foam hats. As long as people were buying foam hats, someone was going to make them.
America has been a beacon of liberty and prosperity for hundreds of millions of people because it was a country where the governed got to call the shots, not the other way around. Yes, there has always been corruption, and there are stains in our national past. And yes, big shots with lots of money and power have had uneven influence. Self-governance was always a challenge, even in America. But nothing has been better than the U.SA. And for most of its history, we only got better.
America led the world when it came to bringing electricity to her citizens. America solved the problem of polio and still has the most advanced medical institutions. It brought the world the telephone. It introduced the assembly line, which transitioned the world from horse and buggy to vehicles. Americans fought and died to defeat Nazis and Communists. America created TV and came closest to fulfilling the idea of independent journalism. It created Heinz ketchup and barbecue sauce, two condiments that have prevented my son from going to bed hungry many a night.
America changed the world. But American greatness goes beyond ketchup and TV.
The secret sauce to America’s success was the nation’s foundational Judeo-Christian values. The brilliant and brave men who founded this nation believed in God, and they believed He favored the creation of America. They also believed that in order for this nation to succeed, people would have to be moral. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters,” Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying. George Washington said, “Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.” When declaring independence, Thomas Jefferson led off with a truth statists and tyrants hate most, that God gave us rights, not other humans, and certainly not government.
Today, the most blatant anti-America demoralization campaign centers on purported racism and our history of slavery. Systemic racism against people of color does not exist. The evidence is clear. Any American citizen of any color can go and do whatever he wants so long as it’s legal. We’ve arrived here because people took seriously Biblical principles that God doesn’t care about your skin color.
And regarding slavery, it was Christianity that abolished slavery. The revivalists who came after Protestant titans George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards began a vicious attack on the institution of slavery. Historian Benjamin Hart wrote, “Among the most ardent opponents of slavery were ministers, particularly the Puritan and revivalist preachers.” These “ardent opponents of slavery” included Levi Hart in Connecticut; Edwards’ son, Jonathan Jr., also in Connecticut; Jacob Green in New Jersey; and Samuel Hopkins in Rhode Island.
Our Judeo-Christian values influenced every aspect of American life. They made America better for everyone, even people who don’t believe in God.
But things have changed quite a bit since our Founding Fathers’ days. And they’ve even changed since my father led us out of Romania in 1989. There exists a blatant coordinated attack on the values and principles that made this nation a magnet for so many generations of freedom seekers.
People who think the same way as those who took over Eastern Europe with communism are poisoning our national well. Secular collectivist values and ideologies have infected every crevice of American society — our public education, our universities, entertainment and media, our government, and even our churches.
From socialism to fascism, all forms of collectivism are societal diseases. They assign value to people based on everything but what they should, which is individual character. Today, collectivism and aspiring tyrants are threatening to send this nation into cardiac arrest. The attacks are coming from the top and the bottom. On the one hand, a significant portion of the populace has become highly immoral and collectivist in thinking, viewing everything through a tribal lens. Much of the public has been brainwashed to aide its own destruction. In some cases, it has been brainwashed into insanity. And from the top, powerful people with massive influence over private companies and public institutions are working to grind this nation down by usurping the Constitution, silencing dissent, and taking control of every significant societal component.
But now is not the time to despair. Precisely because what is happening is happening. And you also should be invigorated that we may be on the cusp of winning. Remember those brilliant documents written by men who truly valued liberty? Well, it turns out they’re paying dividends with our sane Supreme Court judges. But our hope doesn’t rest in the black-robed troupe. That same institution has been helping to destroy the social fabric of this nation in the first place.
The American people are also waking up. Black, white, yellow and brown — freedom lovers are pushing back all over the country. Because it turns out — gasp! — that freedom is a universal desire. It has taken shocks of insanity, but Americans are waking up to the fact that the Land of the Free only remains so if we fight to keep it that way. And we’re fighting. From sea to shining sea, there is no crevice of this country safe from patriots determined to preserve our inheritance.
Another reason not to despair is that it’s simply un-American. This is a nation made up of liberty seekers and fighters. Some of my relatives in the old country, I recently learned, were guerilla fighters, first against the Nazis, then the communists. They ended up having to live in the Carpathian mountains, coming out only to frustrate the collectivist tyrants who sought to control them. During Christmas, they would watch in hiding as the villages below celebrated together. Another relative, who helped us get to the United States, fought with good old-fashioned activism. He exposed and broadcast to the world the atrocities of the communists. He so frustrated the communists they tried to kill him. When that failed, they sent him packing to the United States.
I’m one of many Americans who comes from a line of freedom seekers and fighters. Nearly everyone who’s here has someone in their family tree who risked everything for a chance at the American Dream. Americans have come from every continent to be Americans. This is a nation with mottos such as “Live Free or Die.” It’s a nation that has spilled blood for freedom, here and overseas. It’s a nation of freedom lovers. And thank goodness. Because that spirit is what’s needed now. We are the world’s last barrier to global tyranny. And we’re a darn good one. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to lead in this battle.
This Independence Day, I’m not only celebrating our nation’s founding. I’m celebrating America’s next victory.
Readers, if you’d like to join in the battle to restore America and keep it free and you don’t know where to start, consider The John Birch Society. The JBS recognized in 1958 that there existed a coordinated plan to destroy this nation and remove it as the largest obstacle to one-world government tyranny. We provide lots of ways to learn what’s going on, as well as a national organizational infrastructure to plug you in to effective activism wherever you are. Connect with a local coordinator to learn more about joining one of the longest-lasting, most effective, battle-scarred patriotic organizations in the land.
