My grandparents provided me a unique perspective on life and appreciation for our nation and its Constitution. They and their families had suffered under communist rule for many years. They were known as Volga-Deutsch - German settlers along the Volga River. The Russian communists were quite cruel to these outsiders. Two of my uncles were executed, one for having said life is better in Germany.
Two other uncles and their families were deported to Siberia.
My grandfather had escaped from the communists to Germany in the early 1920's with two brothers and their mother.
He saw the rise of the Nazi party and knew what was coming next. So he immigrated to the United States leaving one brother who decided to stay behind.
My grandfather was a very religious man and provided for his family as a custodian.
He built his own Sears kit home and did his best to assimilate into the American culture.
As a child in the 1970's, I listened intently of his stories of his life in Russia and what the communists promised and what they actually did.
These stories resonated with me, and I felt a family obligation to always do my best, be successful, and live the American dream. This country had taken in our family and it was our responsibility to pay it back with good citizenship.
I graduated from University of Michigan with a degree in chemical engineering and had a good career with three of the largest chemical corporations in the world.
I raised a family in the traditional American way to honor my grandparents and the sacrifices they had made to come to this country.
But that was not enough.
I began to notice events occurring in our nation that were reminiscent to what my grandfather described in his life in Russia and Germany.
In particular I found the attacks on Trump supporters in San Jose in 2016 and the protests at the UC Berkeley campus in 2017 against speaker Milo Yiannopoulos to be abhorrent.
Not so much because of the denial of free speech, freedom of assembly, and vandalism but more so because of the lack of enforcement of the rule of law.
Justice was denied by government authorities thus creating a two-tiered justice system.
We have since then seen far more examples of this double standard justice system.
The United States of America is the greatest nation in the world -- in fact the greatest nation in the history of the world.
It does not need a transformation as Presidents Obama, Biden, and the others have described.
But it does need a course correction that can only be achieved through constitutional amendments.
Some feel that revising the Constitution will put us on a slippery slope.
I say we are already descending on that slippery slope with executive orders and government overreach supported by the Supreme Court.
Our descent can only be stopped through a Convention of States.
