Kids Need Democracy Too:  Reflections on My Grandson's Birth Day 

I was going to
post about the first
meeting we were to have had here in West Liberty last Monday evening
for a community radio. But our schedule was thrown off by a call from
my son-in-law. Baby Joshua was on his way and we had better be on our
way also if we wanted to be there in time. So off we went to Peoria.
We were there in plenty of time. The birth went very well. As a
matter of fact, I felt no pain at all.

As you can imagine
such an occasion
makes a person think a lot. I spent much of the waiting time
reflecting on how the country has changed from my youth, from when my
kids were born. And of course I tried to speculate where this country
may be headed when Baby Joshua is ushering his first-born into the
world.

Will America still
be ready to go to
war at the drop of a hat?

Will the last
strings of our social
safety net finally be cut and everyone will be on their own?

Will the
profligacy of the Republican
administrations have finally plunged the US to third world status?

Will corporations
no longer have to
pretend and openly run the politicians? (this is the one that
frightens me most).

Will the media
still be the partner
of right wing fear mongers?

Or, beginning
with this election,
will Americans quit voting their fears of every bogey man behind
every door and once again set their eyes on the true American dream
and begin to elect men and women to congress who will work to achieve
that dream?

“In
the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a
world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom
of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.

The second is
freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in
the world.

The third is freedom
from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic
understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime
life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.

The fourth is
freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a
world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a
thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an
act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the
world.

That is no vision of
a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world
attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the
very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the
dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

—
Franklin D.
Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the
Congress, January 6, 1941

The
false premises and lies which undergirded Republican policies have
been exposed. Yet that is not nearly enough for the citizenry of this
country to make the leap to a nation where all citizens are valued.
It will take a massive effort and begins today.

Remember
this summer and fall that as you make calls and knock on doors, as
you attend fund raisers and write letters to the editor that each one
of these acts is another drop in the bucket of true freedom. It will
take time. And often in the beginning things may look insurmountable.
All I can say is look back six years and think how bleak it looked
then. We have already come a long way.

And
then join me in looking ahead 30 years to what can be.

Thanks
for listening. and Happy Birthday, Joshua P. Moss!

Dave Bradley is a self-described
retired observer of American politics “trying to figure out how we got
so screwed up.”  An
Iowa City native currently living in West Liberty, Dave and his wife
Carol have two grown children who “sadly had to leave the state to find
decent paying jobs.”