A beacon of freedom. For how much longer?

I am a decadent man. I never really thought of myself that way, but I have come to that conclusion. It feels like an addiction that I can't shake. I can not imagine getting home from work, and after mowing the lawn, not sitting down with a beer and watching Monday Night Football. It is unimaginable to me.

I can not imagine not being able to buy a nice Christmas present for my wife, or not being able to pay for my son's soccer dues. They may seem like necessities, but they are not. They are all luxuries that so many do not have.

Here I sit, on the computer, typing away spewing my gray matter onto the page. There are people in other countries that are struggling just to eat; struggling for shelter from the weather; struggling to resist an oppressive government.

I am not writing this to guilt you into sending money to some starving people in Ethiopia or the American inner cities; although that is a wonderful, blessed thing to do. No, I am writing this for fear that soon, someday very soon, we may have to choose between living in those same conditions, albeit temporarily (we can only hope), or allowing complete government control of everything.

Even before this financial mess came to fruition, the government was talking about taking over the healthcare industry, the oil industry, imposing new controls on how people live in the name of a global climate change that may or may not lead to our destruction, and may or may not be caused by anything that we are doing.

Now with this financial mess the Federal government will take over the bulk of our financial markets first. Then, not to be deterred by the fact that we will be responsible for 8 trillion dollars of debt to China and other foreign nations, but also more than a trillion dollars of bad debt accumulated by shady dealings in our financial sector, the Federal government will still reach out and take over the healthcare industry and continue to impose those environmental controls.

We are mere days away from becoming a socialist country and losing the freedom and prosperity that only a free market can bring. Human beings will always trade liberty for security and when we have spent so many years living decadent lives, we will latch onto anything that will prevent the walls of our straw houses from being blown in by the big, bad financial or terrorist wolves.

We need to be vigilant. We need G-d fearing, fiscally minded, people with common sense and a belief in the ability of people to govern themselves (like our founding fathers had) to run for congress, and for President so as to turn us around before we rush off of that cliff and end up with bread lines and gulags.

We have been so blessed to live in the United States of America, a beacon of freedom and hope to the world. That beacon is now running on an old laptop battery that has seen too many charges; credit card charges that is.