Is this still America?..... "See, you have never experienced a free America. You have never experienced that “shining city on a hill” as Ronald Reagan so loved to describe America. Reagan knew THAT America. He had experienced that America. Many of America’s so-called senior citizens living today also remember that America. I do."
By J.D. Longstreet Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Texas Republican Congressman Kevin Brady asked during the IRS hearings last week: “Is this still America?”
Good Question. It is a question we have asked with great frequency for a number of years now.
As much as I despise having to say it, we are witnessing an America in decline today. We can sugar-coat it, we can parse it, we can ignore it, all at our peril.
To fix it, we must face it. And it is a painful thing to look, objectively, at our country today.
For so many of you who have been born and have attained maturity in America since the 1950s, I can understand your wondering what I’m prattling on about.
See, you have never experienced a free America. You have never experienced that “shining city on a hill” as Ronald Reagan so loved to describe America. Reagan knew THAT America. He had experienced that America. Many of America’s so-called senior citizens living today also remember that America. I do.
Cover of John F. Kennedy
Looking back at the America I was born into before the Second World War—I grew up in a land with unlimited horizons. It was a “can do” country. It was a land where citizens were not afraid—nor ashamed—to love their country and to defend her. It was a land where declaring oneself a patriot did not make one an enemy of the state.
Unlike today’s America, my America was a land unafraid—period.
Why was America unafraid? It was not arrogance. It was, in fact, a solid belief that America was under the protection of God.
Official Portrait of President Ronald Reagan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Agnostics will no doubt, question this. Atheists will, also no doubt, get a chuckle at my quaint belief in “magic.” But it is a “truism.” Therefore, it is a fact and stands as such.
From time to time, this old Pharisee is wont to turn his collar around and climb into his scribe’s pulpit and sanctimoniously deliver a, uh, sermon.
Fair warning: I’m about to do it again … only … this time I will deliver the sermon of someone else. It is a sermon that, I believe, all Americans should hear.
Where did Reagan’s “shining city on a hill’ reference come from, anyway?
Well we have to go a long way back to before the country was actually founded.John Winthrop is credited with introducing the phrase into the American lexicon in the year 1630.
John Winthrop (12 January 1587/8 – 26 March 1649) was a wealthy English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first major settlement in New Englandafter Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of migrants from England in 1630, and served as governor for 12 of the colony’s first 20 years of existence. His writings and vision of the colony as a Puritan “city upon a hill” dominated New England colonial development, influencing the government and religion of neighboring colonies.
In 1630, Winthrop delivered a sermon entitled: “A Model of Christian Charity.” The colonists were still aboard the ship “Arbella” as Winthrop admonished the future Massachusetts Bay colonists that their new community would be a “city upon a hill”, watched by the world—-which became the ideal the New England colonists placed upon their hilly capital city, Boston.
It is noted in the same article referenced above that Winthrop’s sermon gave rise to the widespread belief in American folklore that the United States of America is God’s country because metaphorically it is a Shining City upon a Hill, an early example of American exceptionalism.
Understand that Winthrop drew inspiration for his description of America from the teachings of Jesus Christ. To be specific, Matthew chapter 5, verse 14: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
Even before Reagan, John F. Kennedy in 1961 (then President-elect), speaking to theGeneral Court of Massachusetts said the following: “…I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. “We must always consider”, he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us”. Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill — constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.”……....
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