By Todd Juvinall
I swiped this video of perhaps one of Reagan's greatest speeches from Barry Pruett's blog. Barry took his family to tour the Reagan Library in Simi Valley and I am hoping to do the same someday.
The speech was made in support of Barry Goldwater and of course we know Goldwater was defeated by Johnson in 1964. I was a supporter of Goldwater in Junior high here in Grass Valley and even then I was ridiculed for that support. That was my first attempt at political activism.
I have no memory of the Reagan speech but everything he spoke of so eloquently in the clip above is still relevant now and has grown to become the behemoth government we have today. He speaks of the welfare state, social security, big government and liberalism. He talks about the dangers of giving up freedom for security and the abuse by government agents in taking our property. He uses a farmer, a rice farmer in a midwestern state whose 900 acres were taken by the government and sold becasue the farmer did not want to be part of the government program telling him how much rice to grow.
There is so much in the speech the present day freedom lovers can relate too. He mentions Senator Fulbright's comments stating the Constitution is outdated and needs to be replaced. We know now that Fulbright was a William Jefferson Clinton hero and mentor. The cold war was going strong in those days and the liberals then were preaching and trying to practice "accommodation". Reagan called it appeasement. He was right. Today we see the liberal philosophy of appeasement practiced by our present government in the policies of "political correctness" regarding the nations and ideologies that would do us harm. Some things never change,
Reagan was way ahead of his time and as a common sense man, he saw the end results of policies and government growth and warned us to remember that the Founders tried to prevent that. Well the left has dripped constantly on the rock and has created the nanny state Reagan so described would come to pass if we let it. Many of us have been on the front lines of freedom fighting and as Reagan said, we had to take the slings and arrows of the left and their media pals. We have and still are, called names of derision. Barry Goldwater was defeated on a set of lies told by Johnson and his media pals even then, in 1964!
I hope you watch the visdeo and its full 27 minutes. This speech should be shown and discussed in every school and class across the land. It truly is a speech of warning and of hope. Ronald Reagan was truly a great American. Please watch the video and listen varefully to see if you can agree he was truly a person who could tell of the future.