Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Sitting on a wall is like straddling a fence. It is really difficult and you can’t do it very long without falling off and getting hurt.
Our president has reached that point in his presidency. He is overwhelmed. He is in over his head, utterly clueless on a daily basis. As syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote this week: “ The disinterest, the lethargy of this president, the lassitude with which he pursues this war which he declared himself is simply astonishing.”
This president came into the oval office with no experience in government.. He is an over-educated community organizer. He can make a good speech from a teleprompter if someone writes it for him. He can campaign and raise funds in front of adoring crowds. But he could not legislate. And he cannot govern.
As a one-term U.S. senator he missed 314 of 1300 roll call votes, or 24.2%. As an Illinois State Senator, he voted present 129 times. Former NYC MayorRudolph Geulianoi said about Obama’s term as an Illinois senator in 2008: “Nearly 130 times, he couldn't make a decision. He couldn't figure out whether to vote "yes" or "no." It was too tough… and so he voted "present.”
Unfortunately there is no option to vote present when you are President.
Not long ago he was quoting as saying that he was just going to finish up his term and do the things he is interested in for the next two years and then his successor could have it from there. While he didn’t elaborate on that statement, I think we can read between the lines that he feels like he inherited a mess from George W. Bush and he has no qualms about leaving a mess for the man or woman elected as president in 2016.
But where does this leave us as a country? I am afraid for my country. I probably don’t have many more years but I am terrified for my two teenage granddaughters. As I look back over the past 70 years or so, I’ve had a good life - lots of tears and trials, sickness and struggles with pain, but all in all a good life, good memories, precious family.
But this is no longer the America I grew up in. Unless things change and we have a revival of morality and patriotism and love of freedom, I fear a major collapse of our American civilization.
When President Obama was campaigning and elected on his promise of a transformation of our American way of life he meant that in a much different way than most Americans ever thought about. There were many others, and I was one of them, who sensed a foreboding every time we heard that word “transformation” and we were not wrong.
We have seen our system of medical care, the best in the world, even with its flaws, completely destroyed and its replacement based on lies and deceit, mockery and greed. The flaws could have been fixed without disrupting our entire economy.
We have seen entrepreneurship and capitalism vandalized by a “gimme” mentality, and a nation of people not willing to work were willing to sell their vote for a cheap cell phone and the promise of cradle to grave nanny care from the government. They still don’t realize that we the people are the government and that any time somebody in America receives something for free, it was provided with money taken from somebody else who had to work for it.
We have seen parental freedom threatened, even in something as mundane as mom fixing a lunch for her children to take to school, only to see them return home with it because it didn’t meet Michelle Obama’s standards.
We are seeing young people in Muslim dress demonstrating on our American college campuses and shouting “Allah Akbar”, and demanding Sharia law in the United States.
We have seen race relations set back several years, with hatred and rioting in the streets, violence and crime. I fear for my black friends.
We have seen the rise of the ugly face of anti-Semitism on the streets of America to the extent not seen here in years. I fear for my Jewish friends.
We have seen our law enforcement officers threatened and mocked and assassinated in the streets of the very cities they were trained to protect.
There was a time when if kids got in trouble in school, they also got in trouble when they got home. Now many kids grow up without ever being taught respect for a teacher’s authority.
America is the Humpty Dumpty egg, lying smashed and broken on the ground. Her leaders tried to straddle the fence, and never had the will to make hard decisions. Like the rebellious people of God in the days of Elijah, when the Prophet told them they could no longer straddle the fence between following God or continuing to turn away from him, we find ourselves in a place of crisis.
And we can no longer depend on our national leaders. They do not know where they are going. Like Ashton Carter, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense testified this week, they have no strategy for ridding the world of ISIS. They have no strategy for getting us out of this bad economy back into a reasonable job market environment. They don’t know what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who are sucking the life blood from American citizens who need jobs.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put Humpty together again. We need to do as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln did, when faced with dire situations. We need to call a national day of prayer and repentance. Is there someone, anyone, in a position of leadership who is willing to do this. Humpty Dumpty is waiting, but who knows how much longer he has?
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