I love car rides.

Even as a kid, I enjoyed just getting into the family vehicle. It always seemed to be filled with such promise: a trip to the store, or a hockey game, or maybe the open highway for a family vacation. The cars were bigger back then: more comfortable and built for long land voyages. Plus, since Mom or Dad was driving, I didn’t need to be too concerned about where we were going. I wasn’t nervously glancing at the road atlas, or calculating our fuel levels. Instead, I trusted that the destination would be entertaining, or educational, or wonderful in some way.

Blissfully ignorant, I relied totally on the beneficence of my parents to get us there unscathed, wherever and whatever “there” may be.

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Consider now our country today, as we’ve been taken on the mother of all rides (figuratively speaking) for the past 4+ years. We were told about Change and Hope, obviously, and promised beautiful vistas of Utopian Delight. A world where there was no scary Global Warming/Cooling/Whatever, and the World Community would love us. An end to War. An end to enmity, racial and otherwise. Higher incomes; lowered sea levels. And all brought about by Federally-driven, progressive Smart Power, as we’d soon see what our Government was truly capable of doing.

Well, they certainly got that last part right: we’re certainly seeing what government is truly capable of…

But distracted by all their grandiose rhetoric, far too few of us ever bothered to look at the map, to see where we were actually headed.

And due to that willful lack of oversight, we no longer need to ask the age-old road trip question: “How long ’til we get there?” …because we’ve arrived.

The NSA scandal is just the latest of this government’s freedom-sapping goals, objectives, and efforts. The IRS, DoJ, EPA, HHS, Pentagon, and other new, illicit revelations show cancerous government malfeasance; corruption which has spread to an alarming degree. At least, it would be alarming …IF you hadn’t been paying attention before now.

Because if you HAD been paying attention, you’d have long ago concluded that each are attacks on our personal freedom, our privacy, our right for self-determination, and our individual equality before the law.

Reagan spoke of the dangers we’re seeing many years ago in his famous 1964 speech, “A Time For Choosing“. The snippet below is very brief, and inter-cut with the contrasting view: that Government not only can but should circumvent our country’s laws and freedoms, since It knows so much better what is good for us.

It’s once again time for us to choose: will we opt to be childlike? Are we content to merely be ignorant passengers, unaware and uncaring of our destination, trusting blindly in our leaders’ judgement and good will, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

Or will we decide to be Americans, and wrest control of the wheel away from those who seek to take us to a place which was never intended for our nation?