Socialism in America: Grasshoppers and Greenhouses

Imagine with me, an early spring morning in a meadow. You can feel the breeze dancing along your face. The sun is sparkling, birds above you serenade their mother earth, and the smell of flowers is beginning to blossom all around you. As you look about, you can see two trees standing a way off. One is hidden by the walls of a greenhouse, and the other stands off another twenty yards or so. The tree in the greenhouse is a gorgeous silver oak, well cared for and healthy. This tree is under the constant care of an old gardener. The greenhouse provides the perfect climate for the tree. This tree has all the water and nutrients provided by the kind old man. It is well pruned, with soft, beautiful bark.

The other tree has never been cared for in it’s life. As you walk toward it, you can see the gnarled branches and scarred bark of the old sycamore. It cannot even compete with the beauty of the Oak. But you can see that this tree has succeeded in its quest for survival and strength. Through all the winds and rains, scorching and freezing, this Sycamore has grown by its own might. Though it is not physically appealing, it is strong and self-reliant. While the Oak in all it’s beauty is totally dependent on the old man.

As you stand there, the days begin to go by. Spring turns to summer, into Autumn, and now at last it is winter. The Oak is hidden away from the storm in comfortable protection by the gardener, while the Sycamore is fighting for it’s life. It is just like all the winters before. Each sheet of snow brings added strength to the old tree, as the Oak sits in it’s happy warmth, not heeding the weather at all.

But that was the same day the gardener died.

There is a type of freedom that comes from being self-reliant. Being able to produce and own your property and use it as you choose is a beautiful concept. Thomas Jefferson wrote it into the Declaration of Independence. He called it the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Which he originally wrote as the right to property. Being self-reliant and owning ones own property are ways of living happy lives. Sadly, America no longer protects our rights to freely pursue our own enterprises.

In painful contrast to the beauty capitalism offers, Americans now experience more of the ugly economic system we know as socialism. Socialism is defined by the merriam-webster dictionary as “a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism.” Allow me to direct your attention to a list discussed in congress in 1963. This was a list of “current communist goals” to make America into a socialist economy which, by definition, allows for communism to enter the government. The list, found in the Appendix to the Congressional Record, January 10th, 1963, comprises 45 goals to make America socialist. Out of 45 things proposed by communists to replace that beautiful system with socialism, the only one which has not come to pass is the dismantling of the FBI. In the last 51 years our nation has become exactly what socialists wanted it to become, if not directly by the government, then indirectly by the attitudes of the people.

Some of my listeners may not be convinced that simply a “socialist attitude” is a dangerous thing. Allow me to share a parody of Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper:

An ant had spent all summer working hard to prepare for the winter. He built his home and filled it with stores of food. Meanwhile, his friend the grasshopper just played the months away, never preparing for cold.

When winter came, all the grasshoppers had no food. So they elected a leader who would take care of them. This leader took half of what the ants had prepared, and redistributed it to all the grasshoppers. No one starved that winter.

The next summer, as the ant watched the grasshopper play, he decided that he would go play as well. After all, the government would take care of him. But almost everyone else thought the same thing. When winter came, there was not enough food, and everyone starved.

This is a way of thinking that stems from socialist ideas, and it obviously doesn’t bode well for the ants or the grasshoppers. Winston Churchill made this point in October of 1945 in the debate, Demobilisation, in which he said the following, and I quote; “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” It is imperative that people learn what is happening around them, so they will know what to do when the time comes. The way we can prepare for the political winter on the horizon is by education. It is by teaching the citizen that it is the citizen’s job to keep his country in check. To teach that in a free republic, it is the people’s job to insure the government does not overstep its bounds. But most people don’t maintain that control. Let me tell you about the 2012 presidential election.

In November of 2012 The United States Census Bureau published a statistical election report. This report detailed the eligible voter number with the number who actually voted for president. The results are depressing to say the least. Out of an estimated 319,154,900 citizens only 181,918,293 voted. That is a total of 57 percent. Almost half the people who claim the privileges of being American did not vote for the leader of their nation. According to information also supplied by the United States Census Bureau, if we were to rearrange the population, moving those who voted into the most populated states, and those who did not vote into the less populous, in the 2012 election, 39 entire states worth of people did not vote for their president. They didn't care about their rights, or their liberties. They just played all summer and waited for the gardener to care for them.

We each have an inalienable responsibility to defend our unalienable rights. It is not the grasshoppers job to feed us. We have not been guardians of our liberty! We stand at a crossroads. What we do now will determine the freedom and happiness of our posterity. If we continue the path we have begun, we will, in just a few short years, have to look our children in the eyes and tell them why we didn't fight for them.  It’s a very dark future, but there is a way to right our wrongs.

Consider the American Revolution. There was a great amount of complacency and a feeling of indifference towards England pervaded.  But there was a man by the name of Thomas Paine. He believed that if we would be free, that we must stand up and separate from Great Britain. But did he stand idly by? No, he wrote out the cause for which he so earnestly believed. People were ready to listen to him, and when he published his pamphlet, Common Sense, it became an all-time bestseller in one month. He educated the masses on his vision, and only several months following his pamphlet’s publication, the Declaration of Independence was signed, bringing his vision to fruition.

Like Paine had the power to change the course of history, each of us carries the potential to change the path toward socialism down which our country is heading. But simply because we can change doesn't cut it. These flaws which we have permitted to slip into our nation must be fixed if we wish to posses the happiness found in being self-reliant. We not only can educate, but we must! The first step is not just to tell others, but to act ourselves. We must be the ones to change. It is our roots which must grow deep to make our trees strong. Prepare for the winter to come. The grasshoppers have entered the White House. I urge you to reach out, and like Thomas Paine, build up yourself, and build up those around you. Socialism has taken root in America, and it is time to cut down that tree.