Katie – We are Fighting for that Shining City on a Hill

Posted on December 9, 2019

Katie,

You have lots of friends and lots of people who respected how well you were doing your job in Congress.  And while I only know of you and don’t really know you, we can never really be sure of all the details in the private lives of others (nor, obviously, should all have any right to know all those details).  Regardless, I read your article in the New York Times. You have presented yourself with distinction in the face of less than distinguished circumstances and it is to be admired.

I know your road will still be tough. However, I have no doubt you will make a full recovery.  And I also suspect that if you wanted to return to public life to serve our country again one day, you could successfully do that.

The fight to return this country back to the ideas Americans used to value about liberty and justice for all and respect for the individual as a creature bestowed with certain unalienable rights by their creator needs to continue.  And those thoughts that guide unwarranted hyperactive fears about fear itself at the hands and whims of a demagogue whose arbitrary actions are inspired by cable driven tabloid news needs to be rejected.  And we need to succeed in both these objectives.

If we don’t succeed in these objectives, it will mean a road paved towards autocratic despotic government or even Russia itself (where Putin couldn’t be more pleased with the results of his interference efforts into our 2016 Presidential election).  If that should happen, America’s democratic republic based upon the rule of law as envisioned by our Founding Fathers is certain to collapse as certain as the Ancient Roman Empire collapsed for similar reasons.

The lack of respect shown you with the release of pictures no decent human being would ever take let alone would ever release will be common place but exactly the type of “dirt” unprincipled characters currently holding some of our more important Federal government positions crave and propagate. It is a severe divergence from that Shining City on a Hill that we had all once wanted and another famous American from California once spoke about.  We need to get back to being Americans who are less concerned about what divides us and more concerned about what unites us.

“These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still… a shining city on a hill.”—Ronald Reagan.