Despite protestations from Benjamin Franklin, the symbol selected for the national seal back in 1782 was the bald eagle. Mr. Franklin thought the eagle to be a bird of lesser character, and would have preferred the selection of the wild turkey. I suppose things might seem different to us now had Franklin’s selection prevailed, but without delving into ornithological trivia, somehow the eagle seems the cooler choice.
I’m not sure that caging any animal born to be free is the noblest thing that humans do, but there do seem to be some animals perfectly content to exist in captivity. I know that most of the eagles you see in zoos and game farms are rescues that would not fare well in the wild; still, there is a sadness to see these magnificent monarchs of the skies, born to soar above the mountains, tied to their perches, bound to the earth, dependent on men for their daily bread.
There has been much ballyhoo over the recent revelations on Obamacare. Oh, I apologize for returning to trough again on this subject, but it is THE story coming out of Washington these days, and it speaks volumes on the bigger picture of the political struggle that will determine the future of the nation. There is an order to the Universe. There is a way that things are supposed to go. We can set our sail against the wind, but our progress will be limited. We can swim against the tide, but it will be a very difficult swim. From the beginning, the Affordable Care Act has seemed to be an idea that cut against the grain of the national identity. It required an undivided government, without any support from the minority opposition, and every trick in the book to bribe, twist arms, and circumvent the rules, in order to get the behemoth legislation to just barely become law. It has always been unpopular, but now it is proving to be untenable and unworkable. As the Lord said to Saul on the road to Damascus, “It is difficult for you to kick against the goads.”
In a humorous jab, Saturday Night Live joked that the Obamacare website was only designed to handle six users at a time. The satire proved prophetic when it was revealed that the number of people who successfully enrolled that first day of the rollout was… six. The number was six. Six was the number. All your fingers on one hand, thumb on the other (unless you’re Count Rugen, in which case you will only need the one hand)…that six. The numbers in the following days were not much better, hundreds instead of millions… now the only hard numbers involving millions being mentioned are how many people are expected to lose their coverage by the end of the year. We have moved from using the word “glitch” to words like “debacle” and “fiasco”, and the common man is using another word, “joke”. How could it be this bad? How do train wrecks happen? They happen when the train comes off the tracks, when the train goes where it ought not to have gone.
And so we return to the eagle. The Bald Eagle was in part chosen because it was believed at the time that the bird was unique to North America, and that the United States was to be a nation unlike any other. Each country is unique in its own way, as is every bird. The United States, like the eagle, conveys in it’s image one core idea: FREEDOM. Freedom has been, and still is, our national obsession. Societies are formed from the stew of their history, and the main ingredient in ours is the pursuit of liberty. As such, solutions that are arguably successful in other nations, will not fly in the United States of America. Cows may be fine in their barns, sheep in their pens, chickens in their coops; but the eagle ought not be caged. Please understand that most critics of the Affordable Care Act are not against people having affordable care; but the solution needs to be consistent with our identity and our destiny as a nation, and words like “mandate”, “penalty”, and “control” read cage, cage, cage to the American Eagle.
IMHO: President Obama’s promise, repeated ad nauseum, “If you like your plan, you can keep it, period” has now been slightly modified to: “If you like your plan, and it meets with the standards of what we the government believe you should like, and those standards must enable us to redistribute healthcare from the healthy and easy to insure, to the unhealthy and difficult to insure, by raising your premiums and your deductibles, and mandating coverage you may or may not need, with Doctors you may or may not like; then by all means, you can keep it!” This crystallizes the new progressive definition of liberty. You are free to choose from the choices we allow you. Your liberty only extends as far the borders of the central plan for what “benefits” the entire nation. You are not free to be uninsured, or what we consider poorly insured (which apparently is 93 million of you). You are not free to be unhealthy. You are not free to succeed, you are not free to struggle… you are not free to fail.
Lest you think that even as disastrous a rollout as this will cause the law to fall of its own weight, consider our seventeen trillion dollar debt. Funding is rarely a determining consideration in what our government chooses to do. The signature legislation of the Obama administration won’t simply go away because it doesn’t work. “Never let a crisis go to waste” means that any failure, even possibly failure by design, will be used by progressives to move for even more control, and eventually single payer government controlled healthcare. The free-market solutions advocated by conservatives will be pooh-poohed as inadequate to address such a huge crisis, though invariably the solution to big problems is to take smaller bites, not shove the whole thing in your mouth all at once.
Obamacare is but one bar in the gilded cage progressive politics is forming for the American Eagle. The free food may be tempting, and the cage may seem perfectly comfortable; who needs to fly? Yet there is only sadness in the cage, but there is glory in the skies, even in the stormy skies. Our forefathers called it Providence. Our tracks were laid for freedom, and so our rivers flow; we can go where we ought not go, but it will be against the wind, and lead to a cage not befitting an eagle.
