My father was discharged from the United States Army in 1946 after a hellish tour of duty in France and Germany and victory in Europe. He never spoke to me of his war experience.
My story begins in El Paso in 1949. I was born a Texan, and God willing I will die a Texan and proud citizen of the United States of America.
Much has happened in my lifetime. The establishment of NATO, the end of the Korean War, the tragic Vietnam conflict, ratification of the Twenty-Second and Twenty-Fifth Amendments, American astronauts landing on the moon, a run amuck American Intelligence Operation in the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a perceived pause in Communist aggression.
America once prospered with citizens embracing a strong sense of community and love of country. Americans used to feel like their voices mattered and that those they elected to go to the nation’s capitol would represent the interests of We the People.
We understood that the main purpose of the federal government was to maintain a strong military to keep us safe, provide for roads and transportation to support our economy, and the operation the Postal Service as a basic form of communication--no more, no less.
But things changed. Our military increasingly became enmeshed in foreign wars, divorced from tangible benefit to our national interest. Federal departments of every imaginable description sprang up with massive budgets and veiled usurpations of state and local rights, freedoms, and responsibilities. Even the Postal Service became a miscreation fraught with inefficiency, waste, and corruption.
The two-party political system has come to represent two sides of the same corrupt, wasteful, unaccountable-to-the-citizenry coin. Statesmanship has been replaced by politics. No longer are constituent issues and rights of much concern to the career politicians.
Today, the only thing that matters to our elected officials in Washington is increasing their power and maintaining the grotesque system that keeps them in power. The citizens who elected them are increasingly disenfranchised, even despised.
Now we are at the crossroads of Insanity and Patriotism. In the 2020 presidential election the incumbent president lost reelection. That in itself is historically unusual. The incumbent presidential candidate lost only one of the 19 bellwether counties.
Wuhan Flu hysteria delivered up unprecedented numbers of unverified votes, and live election night coverage showed vote tallies for the incumbent candidate melting away. This was odd and concerning by any measure.
Insanity is best described as continuing to do the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome. Patriotism is exemplified in the lives of our brave forefathers, who pledged “their lives, their fortune, their sacred honor” so that men and women could be free from tyranny.
We can continue on the same insane path of voting for "good" candidates who deliver only excuses about the system in Washington and broken promises.
Or we can strike off in the direction of patriotism and follow in the footsteps of the brave heroes who founded this constitutional republic by convening a Convention of States.
Insanity or Patriotism? We have a choice.
