I’ve been thinking very deeply this week about the divisions in our country; the struggle between individual strengths and weaknesses and freedom to fulfill potential, and the mentality that there are just some people that can’t ever take care of themselves because they are not smart enough, and they should have the right to reproduce at will and not have to worry about paying for anything.

That really is what it is. Some people think that 50% of Americans can never take care of themselves and I am not talking about those who have disabilities that prevent them from being able to work, or people like my grandmother or Trent Lockridge who need to be taken care of in the twilight of their years, but I know people who have significant mental limitations and they hold down fulltime jobs, or despite being physically very challenged they show up to work on time.

To me it is coming down to two basic groups; the responsible and the irresponsible and income has absolutely nothing to do with which group you’re in. It actually greatly depends not on the circumstances of birth; not which neighborhood or family you are born into, but truly whether the adult who gave birth to you loved you and did everything humanly possible for you and sacrificed for you to make sure you were safe so that you knew you were loved and believed in you; that you lived with an adult who lived a life of gratefulness and hard work and inspired you to do the same, the latter being very important. And guess what? Every job is important.

I’ve been thinking about how you can be a patriot, someone who loves their country, enjoys all of the freedoms we have here, but that very same person can be un-American. Like Dave from Lockport. It’s payback time! He doesn’t have the same things that I have and he’s angry and it’s time to take my stuff away so I can’t live any better than him.

The problem with that thinking is the bar for what someone should and shouldn’t have is not stationary but very subjective. Barrack Obama doesn’t think your thermostat should be able to be set at 72 because there are people in the world that don’t have heat. It is un-American to set your bar of how little you should have based on what people in other countries don’t have. The Revolutionary War was fought and won so that colonists would NOT be subjected to that kind of living. Remember they could only have what the King allowed them to have. Those that didn’t want to rule their own destiny, who wanted to continue to live under the rule of the King, they went to Canada after the war was lost for them

It is un-American to want the government to take care of you. It is un-American to want someone else to make less than you just because you don’t make as much. That’s Hugo Chavez and if you really want to live like that you should go live there. But don’t think for one minute that you can have the lifestyle you want the government to provide for you and still have a prosperous country due to the prosperity of those who work hard and have to provide it for you.

They will not coexist.

It is un-American to look at your own lot in life and not understand that it was your own doing. Nobody put you where you have ended up. You’ve made choices and have gotten there due to those choices. The one thing about America though is that you have the freedom at any time to pick yourself up and make better choices and if you really work hard, really hard at changing your future, your future will change.

I think some people hate where they are so much and don’t want to look in the mirror and are looking for someone to blame and pointing a finger at people who made different choices is much easier than trying to change yourself and your future by sacrifice and hard work every single day.

Last week I got a call from a farmer who said he didn’t feel sorry for me. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. That’s not the call I made to Rush but that’s what he heard. I am so very blessed and thank God everyday, multiple times, for those blessings.

My call to Rush was that we work this hard to get ahead. The farmer kept talking and I tried to ask him a question but he was angry so I couldn’t get it in. I wanted to agree with him that price fixing his product, milk, is why he does not make what he should and if he can’t make a decent living being a diary farmer then he should do something else. Farming is a tremendous amount of work, but at the end of the day if you can’t pay your bills then you must do something else. The problem is most farmers love what they do; wouldn’t want to do anything else. Isn’t America wonderful! But it is very scary when we pit one group of hardworking Americans against another. My comment to Rush was that if we were all going to be equalized, which is what the President’s plan is, then we are not going to work that hard. The reason we work that hard, for that many hours a day, is so that we can afford nice things.

Take away our ability to do that and you’ve taken away our motivation. And you know what? Not everyone who works hard reaches the ability to afford everything they want, but everyone has a shot at it. It’s like the wrapping paper sale at the middle schools. The top prize for the person who sells the most is a three hundred dollar IPOD. Out of seven or eight hundred students, fifty motivated students will go out and sell hundreds of rolls of wrapping paper with the hope that they’ll be the one to win it. A little girl showing up at the door is probably going to sell more because people love cute little girls with ponytails. She’ll probably sell more than my 6’4” eighth grader, but he might be a great salesperson. They both have a shot at the IPOD depending on how hard they work and how many hours they want to sell. In fact the success of the fundraiser depends on how great those top prizes are and how much those prizes can motivate those who want the prize. Let’s say you tell everyone in the school that this year you’ve decided to do away with the prizes because some of the kids were upset they didn’t win anything and the kids that didn’t sell any felt left out but you still wanted them to go out and sell because the money is being used for a very good cause. Nobody would go sell wrapping paper.

It is un-American in thinking that there shouldn’t be reward for hard work. So you can say you love your country, that you’re patriotic and be un-American.

I sat next to a woman at a basketball game and we started talking. I am reading a book called History’s 100 Greatest Hits. I finished Hannibal Barca and am on Julius Caesar. I need to know why things happened before us. I don’t have a lot of faith that we are going to make it. This is a first for me. I guess we have to wait and see what the people’s response will be. If we stay asleep and apathetic we’re through. So I was talking to this woman and she said that lately she found herself praying that if we are coming to an end she just asked that her whole family could be taken together. She didn’t want to leave her kids here to try and survive what was coming. I asked her what her friends thought and she said, “I have tried talking to them but they really just don’t want to think about any negative stuff. They just want to get up and live their life and not think about bad things.”

That won’t work people. Bad stuff is happening and if we are not critically thinking about what is going on we are on deep trouble. You should all be talking about this.

Ask yourself what kind of country you want for your children. What kind of opportunity do you want for your kids? We are at a deficit because we are the adults that are not doing the right things for our kids. Our parents made out budgets and lived by them because their parents lived through the depression. Their fathers were lucky enough to survive World War II. Their parents did whatever it took to provide for their families even if it meant going deep into the coal mines for 14 hours a day. The men took pride in being able to put shoes on their kid’s feet and the women took pride in raising nice children.

We’re leaving our marriages in record numbers because we just aren’t that happy. We’re not getting married and having kids anyway because we really want to. That’s just wrong. We’re out dating trying to find our new soul mates and not home for our kids; all selfish stuff. Not cooking nice dinners for them because we don’t get home until five or six o’clock and we’re tired from our busy day. So how do we teach them to sacrifice if we won’t?

We are heading down the wrong side of the hill. We climbed Mount Everest after the Great Depression and it seems we got to the peak and fell backwards. The men who beat imperialist Japan and Adolf Hitler became The Greatest Generation because of their great sacrifice and grit on the field of battle but now we don’t seem to want to do anything like that and our freedom is being threatened from within and without.

We will either rise to the challenge of defending our freedoms or we won’t. Barack Obama has sixteen months before we can stop him by voting in some checks and balances on his power, but that might be too late if we don’t rise up and have our voices be heard.

In sixteen months the Democrat controlled Congress and the Democrat controlled Senate and the Democrat controlled White House could spend so much that our money is worthless here and abroad. Wealth will not only be wiped out but the ability to work hard and get it back will be gone forever and the people that sit back in increasing numbers and let the government take care of them will lose any drive to work and will raise children who don’t know what that is. And we will be Argentina. We will be doomed. We must not let that happen

God Bless

Kathy Weppner