The Shrinking Citizen

Joe Biden and Barack Obama saw that the perks of American citizenship have now become liabilities.

The citizens were the most important aspect of the formation of this nation. It was created for the preservation and protection of the citizens of this country, and as such the citizen the most important thing in America.

The citizen is small now. Tiny. Miniscule even.

An increasingly large segment of our population is constantly being told to just sit down and shut up. If you feel as though you are voiceless and invisible (at least until you owe the IRS), you are not wrong. Yale University professor William Graham Sumner identified that feeling in an 1876 essay:

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X… What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of…. I call him the forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays…“

We always pay.

There was a time that being a strong nation created an aura of protection for our citizens. Having traveled abroad – and in some pretty dicey areas as well – I have felt the protection of being a US citizen with a US passport. There was a time you could call on the protection of the United States military and the strength of America as a shield.

At least I felt that way until Sir Robinette ran away from Afghanistan, did nothing to recover American hostages taken by Hamas and worked to get a black lesbian WNBA player out of Russia while Paul Whelan, Mark Fogel and Sarah Krivanek still are held – and in the interim, the Russians took Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter. The Biden administration has also refused to evacuate America citizens from hotspots from the Middle East to Haiti.

Americans have been killed in Mexico, of all places – just this week, the bodies of an Australian and two Americans on a surf trip were found in a remote well after their truck was found burned. Apparently, the local gang wanted to steal the truck tires and when the surfers happened to return to the truck as the theft was ongoing, the gang just killed them.

Biden has said nothing and done even less.

What I know now is that I am likely on my own if something happens to me overseas. I try to avoid leaving the US.

The Biden administration seems to go out of its way to demean and denigrate American citizens by treating illegal immigrants to benefits normal struggling citizens can’t access.

An important aspect of President Trump’s term was that he brought a feeling to the citizens of America that they mattered – for four years, the middle-class working men and women felt a little less forgotten. We felt important enough to be part of a free America again and less like a herd of milk cows in a government pasture.

People who have businesses and jobs  just want to work to provide more than a subsistence standard of living for their families, and maybe to have enough left over to buy a few adult toys or take a vacation or two so the family can have a little fun – but are spoken to and of by the elites as if they are the cause of all of America's problems.

It seems to me that what is happening is that the middle class is being told they do not matter because in the eyes of the ruling class, they already have ENOUGH. How dare they want more? How dare they want to succeed and improve their financial standing and their standard of living beyond what the ruling class thinks they should have. Don’t they know that trying to get ahead is racist, bigoted, and pretty much every bad thing that can be conceived? Do they not know that when they succeed, that is like stealing from those who are not as successful? Because in our opinion they have enough, therefore, they have no right to speak, and they should just take one for the team and just keep paying their taxes.

There is no doubt that this “sit down and shut up” attitude has created a massive feeling of disenfranchisement as the ruling class ignores what they have done to this country, its economy, and its people through their policies like open borders and horrifically irresponsible economic stewardship.

People simply see the value of their citizenship being eroded away.

It is not just Democrats, although they do make up a large percentage of the condescension, it is statist Republicans as well. There is a significant percentage of the Washington GOP who have as much distaste for America’s middle class as the Democrats do and that shows in their abandonment of the fight for this election.

In Henry V, William Shakespeare wrote:

"He which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart; his passport shall be made."

This is a fight for our culture, our nation, our very civilization. If we want to reclaim our citizenship and make it meaningful again, we are going to need to engage.