The Times They Are A Changin’
There is no way to accurately evaluate and judge the times in which you’re living. Russians in their revolution of 1917 thought they were making their lives better by getting rid of the Czar, and they were wrong. Germany in 1933 thought they were improving their lives by going with Hitler and ignoring the edicts of the post-World War I allies, and the Germans were proven wrong in their moves.
I liken both the Russian and German attempts to make their lives better (and living conditions did improve for a short period of time) to America’s swing to the left beginning with the Clinton administration in the 1990s and culminating with the Obama administration in 2016, during which period of time everything got worse and government became more corrupt, dishonest and secretive.
Most recently we are seeing European governments, mainly Sweden, France and Germany, demonstrate to the world how liberal and compassionate they are by allowing millions of Muslim immigrants into their countries to escape the suffering in their home nations. This liberal, well-intentioned policy is proving to be a disaster for Europe as millions more Muslim “refugees” pour into that rather small landmass with the result being a sharp increase in poverty and crime and the constant threat of terrorist attacks as the very people who want the destruction of the west are allowed into the EU and are permitted to move freely about and perform their evil deeds. And of course under the rule of Barack Obama the United States began this same idiocy as our southern border was opened to all entrants and thousands of Syrian “refugees” were imported into our nation, which is already suffering from Obama’s bad economy, a high crime rate and high joblessness.
American Democrats were also well-intentioned when they promoted the liberal policy of giving poor people welfare and supporting families where no father exists, until some too-smart liberal Democrat politician realized that the Democrats could take possession of the wholly-owned plantation and assure themselves millions of votes and an assured political majority if they could convince a sufficient number of poor Americans to sit back and let big government support them and provide for their housing and food and education and healthcare in exchange for their votes, which would ensure that the goodies would continue to flow. This idea has been proven to be a bad idea as we see poverty getting worse, with the poorer parts of liberal-run cities become a running battlefield of death, despair and destruction.
But with the candidacy of Donald Trump we see a political candidate who has the courage to name the problem (open borders and unlimited immigration; bad schools with no possibility of choosing a better school for poor families; high taxes which keep businesses from establishing in many cities and creating the jobs that would come with such an enterprise; and unchecked poverty and welfare) and propose solutions that would fix the problem, not patch it.
The times are constantly changing, as Bob Dylan told us fifty years ago, but it’s difficult if not impossible to see the changes as they occur. But one thing is certain: we must get rid of liberalism/progressivism if we are to regain our nation’s lost glory and prosperity.