Michael Jackson sang, "I'm looking at the man in the mirror." And if he would have looked in the mirror before his passing, he would have seen a broke, pill-popping ghost of himself. Once popular, once filled with so much potential, once the voice of his generation, Michael Jackson was a talented phenomena who broke down barriers and sold more records than anyone the world has ever seen. Then he lost his moral compass, quit producing viable material, spent his fortune on the useless and the bizarre, and completely self-destructed.
Is it just me or does this sound like America? Once a great nation founded on the principles of restraint - individual liberty and limited government, once the voice of freedom and democracy for people around the world, once the wealthiest nation on earth, we are now a culture on the decline, our free markets burdened by a ballooning federal government and our moral compass wavering.
We are addicted to unsustainable entitlement programs and dependent on government welfare, popping pills we hope someone else will pay for and spending massive amounts of money on frivolous programs. Our glory days are behind us, we produce nothing viable anymore or at least very little, and we have completely neglected to build the plants and refineries necessary to resupply our energy. Meanwhile, we bury ourselves in never-ending debt, most of it going to a traveling entourage of lawyers and political cronies.
It has been a process of killing ourselves slowly - until now. Under Obama, we are on the fast track to our own sold-out memorial service. If this administration has its way, it will turn every aspect of our lives over to Big Brother, from how much we are allowed to make to what temperature we can set our thermostats at to whether or not we are allowed to get the treatments for what ails us. George Orwell predicted this authoritarian future quite brilliantly when he wrote 1984. His only mistake was not calling it 2009 and setting it in America.
Who could have foreseen such a bleak course for the greatest beacon of freedom and liberty on earth? Yet like Michael Jackson, the signs of our demise have been evident for some time. Now we need the courage to speak the truth. It's time for the people of this country to look in the mirror and realize we aren't the energetic, talented and upstart, cool black kid fronting the Jackson Five or moonwalking in Thriller. Our moon trips are way behind us and we are currently thrilling no one. Our economy is sick, we haven't had a hit in years, and we've butchered our founding values as badly as Michael butchered his nose. Would Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams even recognize us today?
As it turns out, all that media coverage wasn't excessive after all. Michael Jackson, eccentric though he was, is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. And while it's too late for the King of Pop, America still has a fighting chance. We just have to tell the incumbents selling us out in Washington, D.C. to beat it.
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