as i began reading this i suggested to the wife that she may wish to read it as well. her response after reading was it sounded like me. what ever you see here you'll know i find it worthy of your consideration otherwise it wouldn't be posted. the calvin coolidge quotes were spot on;

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

I am of the opinion that we are all a part of one of the great epochal shifts in human history and that what we fight to secure today will reverberate through society for generations. We did not ask for this moment — most of us, in fact, have hoped that by quietly enduring the hardships that come our way, our toleration of what is intolerable would somehow be rewarded with comfort and peace. As with all turning points in human history, however, the desire to ignore obvious trespasses in order to forestall conflict has had the effect of encouraging further harm until conflict is all but certain. Like a garden hose tied into a knot, societal pressure has been steadily building, and everybody senses that it could pop at any time. 

As with all revolutionary moments, at the root of this conflict is an idea. In one word, that idea is freedom. Now, governments have been manipulating this word for as long as humans have been demanding it. Lenin seized power in Russia while claiming to "free" the proletariat masses. In FDR's famous Four Freedoms State of the Union address in 1941, the president defended freedom of speech and freedom of religion but also insisted that it is government's responsibility to ensure "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear." In the days since the United States Supreme Court refrained from interfering with the State of Texas's decision to limit abortion after the detection of a baby's heartbeat, pro-abortion Americans have insisted that a woman's "freedom" to terminate her pregnancy up to the moment of childbirth supersedes the baby's freedom to live. So when I say this revolutionary moment is at its heart a conflict over "freedom," I must be clear that it is an ideological battle pitting human life and free will against the commands of collectivist authorities — namely, that individual liberty is a moral imperative being threatened by an increasingly all-powerful globalized government run by a small handful of decision-makers in the name of the "greater good.".....read more.......