I know I can’t be the only one who feels this way.
It was just the other evening, the night before Bill Buckley’s passing was announced, and I had found myself entering a depression because I couldn’t answer a question. How is it that after 232 years of struggle, sacrifice and enterprise, triumph and tragedy, our fair and beautiful Republic has come face a choice for President between a couple of closet communists calling themselves Democrats on the one hand, and a doddering old fool on the other, who’s one claim to political fame is his so-called ability to reach across the aisle and make deals with the likes of the aforementioned Democrats?
Its all the worse as my father’s generation is coming to pass as well. Is this really what we want to come of the great legacy of the “Greatest Generation”? That many of them, like my father, are still with us to see how the fruits of their great sacrifice are being laid waste in a new wave populist naivety, demagoguery and imminent war, leaves me with a deep sense of shame. Shame on us as a nation, as a generation, and as individuals. And shame on me, ensnared in my own busy days, for sometimes thinking that the American people would wake up in time and do the right thing, and for not doing more myself.
Then the next day came the word of Buckley’s death and that he had died peacefully at his deck in Connecticut. I couldn’t help but wonder if the old boy had asked himself the same question as I, and the view into the future it presented in a mind’s eye far keener than my own, was more than he could take.
Any one have a comment?