A Resolute New Year

cross posted at Right Michigan

By nearly any qualitative or quantitative measurement, this has been a disastrous year for both Michigan and the USA. Even hardened and crotchety progressives look to the hope and promise of a prosperous future because their todays are little more liked than those owned by conservatives.

The America of today is not the America that Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Jay envisioned at this nation's birth. Thankfully, it is also not the America envisioned by Jennifer Granholm, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow.

We sit somewhere within an intersection of the two visions. One, a vision of individual liberty painted by some of the greatest thinkers in the history of human kind, and a second vision that yearns for a collectivist society where all of humanity works for the betterment of all humanity--individuals be damned.

Steadily, and with few interruptions over the past several decades, our America has drifted from the former vision toward that of the latter. This change has not come without severe repercussions, and it is these repercussions that have laid all of America low.

I have spent a lot of my last year opining on the dreadful consequences of progressives chasing a Utopian society armed with little more than emotions, ignorance, and naivete. I've talked about unemployment and listlessness, of poverty and hunger, of freedom and its loss. I've also griped about government intrusion into the lives of citizens, and businesses. I've complained about tax policy, spending policy, education policy, energy policy, the military, foreign affairs, domestic affairs, and even the affairs of David Paterson. (Come on men, would you ever feel a need to cheat on that?)

What I'm left with, unfortunately, at the end of this year is what feels like a huge coating of yuck. It is hard to feel any other way.

We are a hair's width from having nationalized health care imposed on this country. We are but a few months from having taxes imposed on individuals and corporations that will further restrict economic growth. We are conceivably but a few months away from Cap and Trade legislation that will impose on America a literal guilt of prosperity so profound as to transcend all political borders on Earth. We have government reaching onto private property to seize cigarettes, fatty foods, water, sugary drinks, and evil bulbs of light. Soon even our hemorrhoids might belong to the macabre Harry Reid. (Who else is going to vote for that guy's reelection?)

In a world of madness, it would be easy to get just as mad in response, and easier still to pick up the toys and go home.

This is precisely why the conservative movement must stay firmly rooted in its ideals and conservative principles--the only thing standing between the America envisioned by our Founding Fathers and the vision of American Utopia as divined by Jennifer Granholm, is the steadfastness of conservatives.

This is not a time for the weak willed conservative. If we throw up our hands and retreat from this fight in disgust, regardless of all the disasters of the past year, we are going to like even less the results that a retreat from political action on the part of conservatives will produce.

Backbone. Steadfastness. Diligence.

There are a lot of words out there that could describe what the conservative movement must have in the year ahead as we approach the 2010 elections.

I have to admit, I was not a huge fan of Jimmy Valvano until after his battle with cancer became public. I quickly learned that he was a man of steely resolve. There were times that I believe that Jimmy V. felt the fight itself was what it was all about; that he couldn't sweat the details of his disease on a daily basis, but that he knew that if he fought with everything that he had on every single day, that he was doing all that he could, and doing nothing less than what should ever be expected of him.

"Don't ever give up," were simple words of wisdom that he delivered behind many tightly gripped podiums beamed across all of America, and, until after he took his last breath, he never did. Conservatives could find few better people from which to take a life lesson.

If and when we go down, we should go down swinging. Samuel Adams wouldn't want it any other way.