MISSING THE "GIPPER"
In my book The Moral Case for American Freedom, I profess my deep admiration for President Ronald Reagan. While President Reagan was nicknamed the Great Communicator, he would often say that he was no such thing. He would say something to this effect: “I am not a great speaker, it is the message in the words I speak that are important”. A good example of this is his message to students under the thumb of Marxism delivered in 1988 at Moscow State University. This remarkable speech may have added momentum to the decline of the Soviet Union. The complete text is included in the Appendices of my book Heartland Rebellion; however, some key phrases are as follows:
“First I want to take a little time to talk to you much as I would to any group of university students in the United States. I want to talk not just of the realities of today, but of the possibilities of tomorrow…
The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States. They are the prime movers of the technological revolution…
…the growth of democracy has become one of the most powerful political movements of our age… Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured…
We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom…
… local television stations…radio stations and daily newspapers, each one an independent, private enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for debates. In the end, the people vote - they decide who will be the next president…
But freedom doesn't begin or end with elections. Go to any American town, to take just an example, and you'll see dozens of synagogues and mosques - and you'll see families of every conceivable nationality, worshiping together…
Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights - among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - that no government can justly deny - the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion…
Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power… In that court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word of a policeman, or any official, has no greater legal standing than the word of the accused…
Go to any university campus, and there you'll find an open, sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American society and what can be done to correct them…
But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things…
Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer…
Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, un-intrusive: A system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith…”
Thank you, President Reagan. You are sincerely missed.
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