A Party of Fools

At the beginning of a lecture in my college Embryology Class many years ago, the professor said that it takes intelligence to feel pain. She quickly added that based upon this scientific fact, those students who had done poorly on a recent exam in the course would probably not experience any discomfort at all!

One of my daughters, a local school teacher in this city, told me tonight how difficult it was today to deal with the never-ending celebration of black students and teachers in her school who were praising God while gleefully congratulating each other that Senator Obama has become President Elect Obama. It is rather amazing to listen to people (black and white) today who voted for this candidate declaring that we have now overcome racial bias and elected a true leader who will "change the world" even though he may not be able to accomplish everything that needs to be done in the first four years of his tenure in the White House.

Back in my Embryology Class, the professor would have said, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch!" In particular I remember that we had a project in that class where we were each responsible for observing the development and birth of a baby chick under laboratory conditions while keeping detailed notes on a daily basis.

As the development progressed to the point where the chick attempted to peck its way out of the cracking shell, one classmate decided to help it by carefully chipping away tiny pieces of the outer shell in order to set the yellow peep free from the confines of its tiny prison.In time, the chick was born, but it didn't prosper and grow. It was never able to stand on its own two feet. Within just a few days, it died. My professor remained passively silent until death had intervened in the experiement. Then she told everyone, "The chick needed to struggle to get out of the shell in order to gain the strength to live." By interfering, even with the best of intentions, the student had denied the peep its only chance to survive.

Because I never forgot that important lesson from my college days, I have become a strong advocate for encouraging people to face the challenges of their own lives without expecting the government or anyone else to do for them what they must learn to do for themselves. God created all of us equally in the beginning by giving us 24 hours in each day and the ability to choose what we will do with that precious but restricted commodity of time!

I believe that Senator Obama became President-Elect Obama on Tuesday because he told a lot of people what they wanted to hear rather than the truth. It was Daniel Webster who once said, “The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.”

In that single quotation, we learn more about who Barrack Obama really is than with everything else that has been said about him or by him in this seemingly endless presidential campaign.

How else can it be explained that a man would be selected to lead this nation when so little is known about where he came from, why he is so lauded and praised when he has essentially no experience in either business or as a government public servant, where all of the hundreds of millions of dollars came from that financed his campaign, or how the trillion dollars in new government programs planned during his administration will be paid for in the next four years.

And can it really be that we have now seen an end to racial prejudice when more than 90% of all black voters in this election felt compelled to cast their ballot for this individual? That’s not the democracy that I know and love in this country. I personally don’t believe that oration skills and generalities are a substitute for leadership and statesmanship. He isn’t even in the White House yet, and I am already tired of the rhetoric. Obama has all the answers; the problem is that he doesn’t know most of the real questions!

Have you ever noticed that we must face many crossroads in our lives; but we rarely, if ever, have an opportunity to come to the same crossroad a second time? As a result of yesterday’s general election, America will never be the same again. It remains to be seen how our country and our citizens will fare during the next 4 years with the liberal Democrats in control of the White House, both chambers of the Congress, and with a free hand to appoint Supreme Court Justices and other judicial officials at will.

Yes, it is a celebration of fools who believe that we can dance in the streets and have everything given to us without paying the full price for it. I fear that the price that America must pay will be very precious in the coming years. Lest we forget, freedom isn’t free!