The American Spectator

America has prospered greatly. Now is not the time to forget how blessed we are or in whose purpose we were founded.  
— Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York

A SLIPPERY SLOPE
Re: Ralph R. Reiland’s Students’ Confusion About Capitalism:

It’s an easy prediction to make: There will be a continued massive movement towards socialism as long as the word “budget” is a synonym for unfunded spending plan. The taxing of Americans continues unabated, the media is spinning it as a good and natural thing, and Mr. Obama is in the media 24/7 preaching doom and destruction if His Plan is not followed. In no uncertain terms, personal and professional destruction is promised to the dissenters.  

As more private sector jobs are traded for public, as more wealth is destroyed for the public good, the faster we slide towards the final oblivion of the liberal dream. The elites that control the media, abetted by the teachers unions, have been inoculating our children for a good 20 years, and we have nearly two generations of nanny-state high school grads now in college who will be looking for the state to provide that which they cannot conceive of producing for themselves. There is no force on earth that can reverse this trend.
— Greg Mercurio
Vacaville, California 

BORN TO BE WILD
Re: Henry Gekonde’s The New Hampshire Motorcycle Fetish:

It would seem that ignorance is not bliss! The author is exactly the type of urban dweller who would ban guns. Why? Because I don’t have one.

My motorcycles have carried me many miles in many countries. They are my therapy. They also have been loud. Why? Because people like the author pay no heed to us so we warn them we are there with high beams and noise in the hope they won’t kill us. He prefers the homogenized, white milk flavor of life. My life works better with jalapenos and Tabasco sauce.

While the author spends his vacation, perhaps at “Mahther’s Vineyahd,” discussing the vicissitudes of life as an elite who must do our thinking for us; that we are too “well, dumb,” to do it for ourselves, motorcyclists are on the road. There is America out there. There are vistas, smells and people who add the flavor to life. We ride the “twisties” with the same verve as the author makes his fresh squeezed orange juice. In fact very often the twisties are so twistie that you go back and ride them again. For the ride is the destination, a place is just where you spend the night.

Yes “motorcycles are everywhere” and what provokes you is that faint stirring of masculinity that echoes somewhere in your DNA. It yells at us and whispers to you: “Take a risk! Get some adrenalin moving inside you! Do something the purpose of which is solely to exhilarate you.”

Oh yeah! Put your significant other on the back. Your sex life will reignite like a bonfire.
— Jay Molyneaux
North Carolina

AMERICA 2035 OR WILL YOU REMEMBER?

I knew a country long ago
Where you could say what you wanted to say.
You could work where you wanted,
Your ambition undaunted,
And you could pray how you wanted to pray.

It’s an era we’ll never retrieve.
Young people now will not believe
That that fairy tale land
Is the place they now stand.
Their minds simply cannot conceive

Of a time out of mind,
But my memory can find
Those happy days.
The music still plays
When I close my eyes and remember…
— Mimi Evans Winship