By Craig Andresen – Right Side Patriots on American Political Radio

I have said for years, that no single election, nor a single president can right what is wrong with our country, and I stand by that assessment.

The reason I have said it, and the reason I believe it, is because the situation in which we find ourselves has not occurred over night. It’s taken decades to arrive at the brink of the abyss and it will likewise take decades to turn the ship around and have it sailing in calm waters.

Over the years, I have outlined several key reasons regarding our slow, steady spiral into turmoil, which of course includes the liberal/socialist agenda, the entitlement mentality of the last couple of generations and, of course, a detached from the intent of the Founders and Framers populous who only seem to think the time to get involved is when an election cycle rolls around.

But there is more to it than that.

As a nation, I believe we are suffering from a profound lack of self-reliance.

Our Founders and Framers were decidedly self-reliant and to be perfectly honest, they entrusted a new form of government to a populous they believed would remain self-reliant, or at the very least, would need to remain so in order to make our Constitutional Republic grow and prosper.

Over the last few generations, we have seen that spirit of self-reliance wane, dwindle and come to a near screeching halt. But why? What is at the root of this thing?

Why has a nation that built itself, prospered, innovated and produced gone stagnant? Hard work and self-reliance brought about our industrial revolution and built plants and businesses that built things. Self-reliance and exceptionalism won two world wars. A renewed mentality of self-reliance and exceptionalism took us from never leaving the earth’s atmosphere to walking on the moon in less than a decade.

Self-reliance and strength of character brought down the Berlin wall and brought about the end of the Soviet Union.

There are, of course, those who will point to technology as the next step in our evolution of greatness, and while on the surface, that seems reasonable, I contend that it is, in fact, technology, or perhaps more accurately, the way we employ technology, that is causing our current stagnation of exceptionalism.

To begin with, we now have a generation of gimme-gimme entitlement fools who simply don’t believe in either personal responsibility or in self-reliance. Far too many in that particular generation simply believe they can have whatever they want…at someone else’s expense because it, whatever it is, is owed to them.

This is also the same generation that has finally been dumbed down enough, through their indoctrination at the hands of liberal/socialist educators, to believe that the rewards of effort just aren’t important enough to put forth the effort. Win or lose, far too many in this generation expect a trophy because there’s always been someone there to hand them a trophy.

Now, add to the mix, technology.

Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart houses. Smart devises here, there and everywhere.

Smart food. Smart shoes. Smart lights…the list of technological smartness just goes on and on but to the far too many of the gimme-gimme generation…smart technology has ceased to be a tool, and has become their excuse.

How many times have you seen two gimme-gimmes, sitting side by side…and texting each other? The smart technology has provided them with an excuse to not speak to one another.

Smart cars, cars that drive or park themselves, have given people a reason to ignore or simply not bother to learn how to park a vehicle and cars that apply the breaks for you…we’ve all seen them in television ads, have given those who drive them an excuse to not pay attention to where they’re going.

Smart houses do everything from adjusting the heating and cooling, after “learning” your home and away habits to turning lights on and off as you enter or leave a room.

Turning off the light when you walked out of a room used to be your responsibility.

No longer.

There was a time, and perhaps I’m showing my age, when if you wanted to know how to get from point “A” to point “B”, you pulled your car over to the side of the road, unfolded a map, and plotted your best course. Those days are gone, because people now rely on their smart phone or smart watch GPS which could as easily lead them off the road and into a ditch as it could point them in the right direction. When those people have to explain to their insurance company…what happened…it’s never their responsibility…their GPS is the excuse.

Am I blaming all of our country’s ills on technology? No…not by a long shot. Quantum leaps in technology took us from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility. Technology took us from cloth bandages to heart transplants. Technology took us from horses to 750 horsepower…from 10 story buildings to 1776 foot tall buildings…from the telegraph to teleconferencing and from our little corner of the world to having the entire world at our finger tips.

How we use technology…that’s the problem.

Case in point…ask your garden variety 15 year old kid to customize your website and they’ll do it while they’re eating a snack. Ask that same 15 year old kid to relate a personal experience to an audience in a public setting and they can’t get out more than 3 words in a row without saying the word, “like,” and every sentence they utter pitches up at the end as though it were a question, rather than a sentence.

Why?

Because your standard 15 year old can read HTML code…but they can’t read a room.

They’re techno savvy beyond belief, but they are social morons, and social media plays a big role in that. Because of various social media avenues, far too many in the gimme-gimme generation can’t express themselves in any more than 140 characters at a time and emoticons have nearly, in their lives, replaced real emotions. To them, thanks to technology, their world exists as a tweet, an Instagram pic and a wall. Their best friends are people they have never, nor are ever likely to meet, and they simply can’t relate, one on one, face to face…with anyone.

Is it any wonder then that such people have no interest in getting a job, where they would need to be part of a team in order to accomplish a task which would, in turn, earn them not only the things they want, but the positions in life they seem to believe they deserve?

The greatest generation left high school and went off to fight in a world war to preserve our freedoms and free others from tyranny, oppression and genocide. The latest generation leaves high school, and sits on the couch, typing with their thumbs and demanding $15 dollars an hour if they are expected to get an entry level job.

What I’m saying is that today, America is divided…culturally…and the great advances we have seen over the past 50 years in technology plays a role in that divide.

We have gone from a society that created technological wonders so that we could do great things to a generation that uses technology to do almost nothing…a generation that now has a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between reality, and virtual reality.

We have a duty, and now an opportunity, to combine technology with common sense. In fact, I believe we have an obligation to reverse decades of decline in our culture, to instill in a new generation, replete with tools we could not have imagined just a decade or two ago, a sense of self-reliance, exceptionalism, personal responsibility and the motivatioto earn, rather than to simply expect a better station in life.

This is nothing new.

In fact, decades before most of the gimme-gimme entitlement generation was even born, a very similar challenge was issued.

The question now before us is…will a new generation rise to the occasion, and strive to do more with technology rather than to do less because of it?

It’s a matter of leadership, really, and like those who expect technology to do everything for them, far too many of us from either side of the political aisle expect leadership, from those we have sent to our halls of government, to do everything for us.

Cultural revolutions always begin with technology and such a concept was the driving factor for our nation’s Founders and Framers who, with the simplest piece of technology imaginable…a piece of paper…revolutionized government.

Our Constitution took leadership away from elected officials, and placed it directly into the hands of the people…a concept as foreign to the world in its day as turning on the lights in your home, from the other side of the world, by pressing a button on a cell phone would have been to Kennedy the day he delivered his speech regarding going to the moon.

If we are to ignite a new cultural revolution…if we are to step back from the abyss of cultural disaster and once again stand on the brink of exceptionalism…the tool we must employ is not a handheld device that does things for us…it is a piece of paper that tells us that we must do things for ourselves.

We must erase the notion that we elect men and women to lead us…and embrace the notion that we must lead them. We must eliminate the notion that we are entitled to anything and accept the notion that we must earn everything.

We must use the technology that our exceptionalism has created to do exceptional things and we must stop relying it to in order to do…to actually do…as little as possible.

For a culture that has invented everything from the smart phone to the smart chicken…by liberal/socialist design, we have more stupid than our phones or our chickens could ever compensate for, because rather than leading the way, we have become far too content to be led away from the very thing that that sets our nation apart from all others…

Opportunity.

Since the dawn of mankind, humans have always created, and then used technology, to make life better. Regrettably, over the past half century, we have focused on creating it to make our lives easier. The same people who will sleep on the sidewalk for nights on end in order to get the newest iPhone…won’t spend a couple of hours a month to attend a City Council meeting….and then they’ll complain on Twitter and FB about what their City Council just did.

As a society, we have become increasingly technologically brilliant while, at the same time, culturally stupid and to put a fine point on my point…we now expect political remedies to our cultural ills.

We now elect politicians to fix our cultural decline.

One voting bloc says they’re owed something because of long past social ills, and they have voted for a single party for better than 50 years to fix it for them.

It hasn’t been fixed because those given the supposed power to do so know that if they do fix it…they will make themselves obsolete to that voting bloc, and they won’t allow the other side to fix it for the same reason.

The honest truth to the cure resides in that voting bloc as Americans…not as part of some segregated culture…as it does with any other voting bloc and whatever cultural ills from which they claim to suffer.

Today, we call these supposed afflictions…social issues…when, in fact, they are cultural issues, and while we have come to expect the solutions to those issues to be delivered to us by politicians…the real power to effect change doesn’t come from a legislative body, nor should it come from a judicial body…it should come from us, as individuals…as an American culture that insists on exceptionalism as the natural result of self-reliance and strength of character.

But…if we can just stop enough traffic…if we just use enough hashtags…if we burn enough businesses, make enough signs, pray hard enough, label enough people…and expect the politicians we elect, based on the slogan we liked the most…to fix it all…we’ll be just fine until the next election cycle rolls around with its new slogans and updated hashtags.

Right?

Wrong.

We have in front of us, a new year full of opportunities, and we should seize them as we once did…with common sense.

Text less and talk more. Become friends with people in your neighborhood over coffee more and friend less people you will never meet. Think for yourselves rather than letting TV talking heads do your thinking for you. Quit taking selfies in the mirror. Break records instead of recording things that are broken. Park your car yourself. Rediscover what the light switch does and shut them off as you leave the room. Get over yourself, the color of your skin, how religious you are compared to the other guy and lose the hyphens.

Just because we can build something, doesn’t mean we should and just because we haven’t figured out how to build something, is no excuse for not trying to build it.

Have an opinion, don’t be afraid to share it and stop worrying about hurting somebody else’s feelings. You’re going to win some…and lose some…but only expect a trophy for the ones you win.

If you don’t like the pizza place or the bakery, because of who they will or won’t do business with…find another pizza place or bakery.

If the side of the aisle that has promised you everything for 50 years hasn’t delivered…try voting for the other side of the aisle and see what happens.

Your life doesn’t matter any more than anybody else’s because you’re this color or that…you’re not privileged because you’re this color or that…people can be racists if that’s what they want to be and it doesn’t require any specific skin color to qualify in that regard.

If you’ve come to our country illegally, and you’re not a citizen of our country…you are an illegal alien and you shouldn’t get the benefits of those who have taken the time and put forth the effort to come here by perfectly legal means.

If you think you’re better than somebody else because you’re straight and they’re gay…you aren’t. If you think you’re entitled to what others have earned because you’re special…you aren’t. If you think you can burn, loot and riot because you don’t agree with things…you can’t. If you act like a thug…don’t be surprised, or angry, when others think of you as a thug.

There are well over 1 million cops on the streets in our cities and towns that did absolutely nothing wrong today. There are maybe 5 or 6 that did. Don’t judge the million by the half dozen or if you do, don’t be surprised if the million start judging you before they even meet you.

Climate change is the weather…frozen turkeys at the grocery don’t deserve a funeral…unborn children have as much a right to be born as you had to conceive them and a manger scene in the park, Christmas carols at the mall, Under God in our pledge and saying a prayer before a City Council meeting never hurt anyone.

None of these things, and/or others, are technological issues and none can be solved by technology. They are cultural issues and therefore, should be out of the realm of the federal government and, if relegated to any politicians anywhere, should reside at the local, or at most, the state level. But the real fix for these issues, rests in the people themselves…in us…each and every one of us.

Rather than using technology as a crutch, so as to stagger about aimlessly complaining…we should use technology to make things…not excuses…to build things…not tear them to shreds and to reach out instead of closing ourselves off.

Exceptionalism…American exceptionalism does not come from the things we invent…the things we invent come from our exceptionalism…from our culture, our self-reliance and our personal responsibility.

From common sense.

The next time your smart phone rings…answer it, like we all used to before we could look to see who was calling first.

You just might be amazed at what could happen when you take the time to say hello…it may well be opportunity calling.

REMINDERS!!!

As friend and partner, Diane Sori, remains in FB jail…unable to post…please check out and share her op-ed “The Generals, the Cabinet, and the Lefts Anything but Righteous Indignation” by CLICKING HERE!!!

ALSO…RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS…LIVE!

Today, Friday, December 16th, from 7 to 9pm EST on American Political Radio, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori will discuss why Trump appointed generals to key cabinet positions, America’s culture decline, and the Russian’s did NOT do it!
Hope you can tune in at: bit.ly/2cpXuRd