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“Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” — Will and Ariel Durant

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” – C.S. Lewis

Too many Americans have become like the spoiled trust fund kids running the family business. Grandpa built it and knew it top to bottom. Dad learned from him and kept it going. Now they’re taking over and unfortunately, they never really bothered to learn the ins and outs of how the company works. They just look at it as a place where they can have a fancy title and get money to finance their lifestyle.

Many Americans don’t know why this country is so successful, don’t understand the long-term ramifications of the things they advocate politically and don’t get how lucky we are.

Knowledgeable conservatives know better. We know that we are fortunate enough to live in what Reagan called a “shining city on a hill” and that eternal flame that sets us apart from other nations can easily dim. Americans should consider that many of the things they take for granted are not necessarily so.

You see, far too many of us take it for granted that….

1) ….We can not only refuse to teach patriotism to our kids, but teach our kids in schools that our country is a horrible place and it won’t produce people who are disloyal to our nation.

2)….Black and Hispanic Americans can be incessantly encouraged to create and nurture racial grudges, white people can constantly be put down, degraded and discriminated against via programs like Affirmative Action, but Caucasians won’t increasingly adopt the same racist attitudes liberals encourage minorities to hold.

3) …We can accuse a man of rape if the woman he has sex with has been drinking, weirdly demand verbal consent for every stage of a make-out session and accuse a man of sexual harassment if a woman claims he grabbed her butt 30 years ago, but it won’t have any ramifications for male/female relationships.

4)….We can hamstring our military with ridiculous rules of engagement, have soldiers on the battlefield call lawyers before they can shoot targets and have politicians make military decisions based on how it will play in the press; yet our troops will still win wars.

5)…We can smear the Christian church at every opportunity, tar every decent person as a secret hypocrite and write morality off as old timey, but the people in our country will continue to be good over the long haul.

6)…. Social Security and Medicare will always be available for the enormous number of Americans that depend on it even though we have no money set aside for either program and we have an unsustainable debt that we are adding to every year.

7) ….We can ignore lawbreaking by illegal aliens while playing political games with our justice system based on whether a Republican or Democrat is being targeted without ordinary Americans losing respect for the rule of law.

8) ….We can put men with poor character in office; yet they’ll still do the right thing for the country, instead of themselves, when they’re elected.

9) ….We can run up an astronomical debt that we never intend to fully pay off, large parts of which are held by nations hostile to us, but they will never choose to crash our economy by refusing to lend us more money that we may not pay back one day.

10) ….We can shut down speakers we disagree with on college campuses; the police can charge exorbitant fees to allow someone to publicly exercise his 2nd Amendment rights and social media giants can quiet anyone they want without consequence, but the rest of us will continue to have our right to free speech honored.

11) …We can trash the police at every opportunity and give the benefit of the doubt to the criminals they arrest instead of to them, while they’ll still be willing and able to effectively do their jobs.

12) …We can abandon the pure capitalism that made our country so rich, pile regulation on top of regulation and exorbitantly tax the most productive members of society without it slowing down the economic growth, jobs and opportunity for everyone.

13) ….We can coddle our best and brightest college students so much that they get “triggered” by hearing things they don’t like, expose them to professors that are Communists, bombers and radicals and then expect them to be tough, competent and capable enough to keep the country running one day.

14) …We can bring in enormous numbers of immigrants from non-Western, socialistic and often backward countries, immerse them in a culture that strongly discourages assimilation and they, or at least their kids will fare as well as anyone here.

15) …We have clean water, decent roads, full supermarkets, Internet access, non-corrupt cops, shoes, free speech and a hospital that will fix a broken leg whether you have money to pay or not. Compared to the MAJORITY of people on Earth, Americans live in a utopia. Yet, all we ever hear are complaints and endless kvetching about how horrible it is to live in such a rich, powerful country that has done so much for the world. Part of that is human nature. It’s easy to focus on what you lack instead of what you have…until you don’t have it any more.

More Americans need to start thinking about preserving this nation for our children. Of all the terrible things we could do as a people, the worst would be to squander the incredible opportunity we’ve had and to leave future generations of Americans with nothing but a shallow husk of what this country is today.