Slavery is SOOO "in"!!

Slavery was outlawed 150 years ago, right?

It was outlawed, yes; but it is far from being a thing of the past. It is alive and well in modern day America. Here are just a few examples:

-- WELFARE - in theory, welfare is a fantastic program to help people TRANSITION themselves from hard times back into a situation of financial "independence". The reality here, however, is that the long-term cultural shift that welfare has encouraged has enslaved countless Americans to a life of "dependence".

-- UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS - again, in THEORY, this is a great idea. The reality is that more and more Americans are DEPENDENT on these benefits and are in no hurry to get off "unemployment". I am a hiring manager for a very large company. In this terrible job market, we are CONSTANTLY hiring. The reason we are constantly hiring is because there are so many people who do not want to work. Due to the constant hiring, we often hold "open houses" to help us make several hires at one time. In these open houses, dozens of people show up ..... typically, as many as HALF of them are just there so we can sign their sheet saying they interviewed for a job so they can take the form back to the unemployment office and justify continuing their unemployment benefits.

-- CREDIT - ignorant consumers and predatory lending are the single biggest contributing factors to America's current financial crisis (yes the government encouraged all sorts of shady lending practices, but who FORCED the consumer to take out the loan they knew they coudn't afford?). ANYONE who has debt is ENSLAVED to the person they borrowed it from - unless they have the readily accessible capital to pay off that debt at any given moment.

What may jump off the page at you here is that all 3 of these examples (there are plenty more by the way) are VOLUNTARY actions. How can something VOLUNTARY be a form of ENSLAVEMENT you ask? Simple. First of all, we have an image in our minds of slavery being a white man whipping and beating a colored man while they are picking cotton for their "master". So nothing else can possibly be called slavery, right? FALSE. Our CULTURE (or MORALS that is) is deteriorating constantly and expeditiously generation after generation. The reason for this backwards shift in morality is because the "I DESERVE IT" mentality of the average American has replaced the "I CAN EARN IT" mentality (to say nothing of the removal of God from our culture).

Look at what our modern society considers "poor" to be here in the year 2010. You have a well-fed (often overweight) person with a roof over their head, cable TV, a cell phone, honest work at minimum wage, at least 1 car, electricity, water, furniture, video games, iPods, and on and on ...... That is a POOR person?? It is by American cultural standards. It is sad that we don't recognize that this lifestyle is still better than 95% of the rest of the world!!!!

Now think about what "poor" looked like 100 years ago ... skinny and hungry, no job, no home, no car (or no horse/cart), no plumbing, no electricity, no food stamps, no "umeployment", no social security, no food, no medicaid/medicare, no NOTHING. Now THAT is poor.

Now compare the second example to the first. First of all, the person in the second would have looked at the person in the first and recognized them as WEALTHY - even ELITE! Secondly, the person in the second example would NEVER have blamed the wealthy people, or the government, or their "creditors" for their situation. They would have taken responsibility for their situation and they would have WORKED their way out of it.

So the new standard of "poor" is called "progress" by some. I call it the collapse of FREEDOM.

We have to "have it NOW". We have to have it BIGGER and BETTER and NEWER and "BLINGIER"! So what do we do? We "charge it". We take advantage of "the system". We convince oursleves that we are justified in not taking honest work for less today than the job we lost yesterday. We "give in" to our children and lower the standards of what it means to be TRULY FREE. We blame others. We play the "victim". We look for excuses to wallow in our misery. We "settle". THESE THINGS ARE ALL UN-AMERICAN.

We change our CULTURE. We change God (his role in our lives). We change our Country. Eventually, we lose our Country. We lose God. We lose America. We lose our Freedom. We enslave ourselves. And we do it with the finger pointed at anyone BUT ourselves.

Look in the mirror and make a change (a little Michael Jackson for you there). Make a commitment to do YOUR part. It's the only part that YOU can control. If more of us are doing that than not, then we can save ourselves from the destructive path we are on.

The Patriot