Monday, November 09, 2009

The Berlin Wall and the Health Care Wall

Why the Berlin Wall Fell
"And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. 'What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history,' he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope."
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It is a tribute to Reagan's moral and strategic determination, as it was to everyone else who played their part in bringing down the Wall, that they could see through the sophistries of Soviet propagandists, their Western fellow travelers, and the legions of moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall.
When the wall came down I was 14 years old and though I knew it was historic, my frame of reference to WHY it was so important that the wall came down was probably lost on me. Sure, I had grown up in an era, up to that point, of the Cold War, but my frame of reference was really the thaw. Reagan had been in charge of things and had been taking on the Soviets for a few years before I realized what was happening. History tells me that Reagan had it right and so many of his detractors had it all wrong.

In any event, what I seem to take away from learning about the Berlin Wall is that it was built to keep people in. It was erected to prevent people from being free. It stood in the way of people exercising their liberties and instead trapped them in a prison of socialist/communist living death. It was like the wall of a prison - again - built to keep people trapped within its barriers. Communists build such walls because very few would choose communism of their own free will. It has to be imposed, much like its little sister, Socialism.

That brings me to the present. The current administration and its radical allies in Congress are intent on building their own wall - not of bricks and mortar and barbed wire, but whose imposition is no less enforced by armed guards. Their health care bills are a wall. They are the walls to a prison that will keep Americans locked in to a government run health care scheme that benefits only the bureaucrats who run it and the politicians who, like drug dealers, wield power over those addicted to their product. America fought so hard, for so long against such things as evidenced by the Berlin Wall coming down. It cannot and will not be forced upon us. Not now. Not ever. Not without a fight.