The following was written by Shelby Murphy, State Content Writer for Convention of States Texas.
“If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that,” declared President Obama in a 2012 speech, six years after I opened the doors to my fitness training studio.
I had worked, sweated, worried, rejoiced, and woke up before dawn to make that business a success, or at least enough to feed my family, and now the President of the United States was telling me that what I achieved had little to do with my own efforts.
That I, and every other entrepreneur who had a dream, relied upon, or at least should be grateful for, the beneficent federal government to dole out the things that would ultimately contribute to our “collaborative” success.
I was heart-sick. I felt defeated. And I wondered if the American Dream would survive. It had been a tough six years, through the Great Recession and an anemic recovery that never quite took hold.
On November 7 of that same year, the day after President Obama won a second term, I stood in my studio alone, dark after a full day of serving our clients, and cried. I didn’t know if my business could survive another four years of an administration that was doing all it could to sabotage my family’s success in an attempt to garner more power for itself. More truthfully, I didn’t know if I could survive it.
The taxes were overwhelming. It seemed like any time we had a few extra dollars to reinvest into the business, we owed it instead to the government. The regulations were mounting too. We would, only two years later, lose our health insurance coverage we had always provided for ourselves due to Obamacare.
For the first time in my life, I felt trapped. I was caught in a vicious circle of work, taxes, and very little growth opportunity because of shrinking profit margins.
In 2015, we finished out our lease, liquidated our equipment, and bid our loyal client base goodbye. My husband switched careers and we returned to Austin, a city where our children had been born and felt like home, and soon after to San Antonio for career advancement.
But something strange had happened to the world during the nearly 10 years we had been nose-down, plowing away in our business and raising a family. We hadn’t realized the extent that everyone had lost their freedoms – freedom to say what you wanted, freedom to laugh at our common human foibles, freedom to have opinions that run counter to what is dictated from Hollywood or Washington DC.
My husband and I felt like we had been asleep for 10 years and awoke on another planet, where a whole generation had been taught to hate this country, to love the government, to crave safety rather than adventure, to reject responsibility and instead see themselves as perpetual victims. We thought that the years of the Obama administration had castrated the American Dream only for small, independent entrepreneurs – we didn’t realize how ensnarled in hate, blame, and dependence the whole country had become.
I craved an outlet to fix all that had been broken. I needed a way to make a difference, to fight for the American Dream again, to prove that freedom is still available to those who value it, and to work toward a system that honors and rewards effort and self-reliance again.
I turned to voices I found on talk radio and on the internet. People who still believed in the same values of hard work and independence that I was raised on. People who didn’t follow the herd and who weren’t scared to say what’s true.
When one of those voices, that of the fast-talking, uber-intelligent Ben Shapiro, told me about this Convention of States organization that he believed in, I investigated it immediately and was excited by what I had found.
The Convention of States is the outlet I need – a purposeful process to rein in the out-of-control federal government, to return some power to the states, to reassert the original direction of the republic and reinstate the American Dream.
I immediately signed up to volunteer. Now I eagerly await the day when a Convention of States is called, the people take back the power from the federal government, and we can look to Washington DC and say, “Yes, we did build that.”
Want to join Shelby? Sign the Convention of States Petition!
