IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE
By Hetty Gray
# 290
February 12, 2021
“Word Power”
Weeks have elapsed since my last column. I apologize, but I’ve been thinking.
Ah, thinking — another activity common to my age group. You see, we were taught to listen, read and then decide. Oh, if that were the case today among all our people. Well, America made a turn last month. It’s as if you stand in the hallway of a hospital and hear the phrase “a turn for the worse.”
I lamented in a column about ten years ago that Americans had forgotten how to laugh and find humor in everyday situations. I had no idea that what I viewed as a shortfall in levity would morph into the left’s anger and vengeance we see today. There is nothing funny about current events.
My parents and grandparents’ generations lived through World War I and World War II. They recognized first-hand the calamity wrought by Fascist, Socialist and Communist governments. The post-World War II baby boom and attendant surge in home ownership and economic growth gave rise to the bright, hopeful world of my parents.
Entertainment diluted the self-motivation of my generation and its children. I admit it, I am as guilty as the next one for the Pac Man mentality. Oh, how my boys enjoyed those video games! Reared by parents who read voraciously, I too find great solace in books. I regret that my children do not share my love of reading. To this day, I still read about one book a month on average. For the last 57 years, I have read one particular book every year — Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Adding George Orwell’s 1984, the picture painted is so familiar that it is scary. New words creep into the vocabulary and their purveyors label other words off limits.
I could go on and on with this discussion, but it would be to no good end. Shockingly, a new edition of TASS (Soviet government-controlled media) thrives in mainstream media. Ernie Pyle and his peers are rolling over in their graves.
I cite my own experience. My hometown paper began as a merger of The Shelbyville Democrat and The Shelbyville Republican. Voila – The Shelbyville News! The paper was careful to present two sides and let the readers decide. Locally owned until about ten years ago, it was purchased by an out-of-state syndicate with distinctly left leanings. My column ran weekly and I had quite a good following. However, the kiss of death was that I was very conservative in my writings. Much to management’s chagrin, I dealt in facts, not feelings.
The paper delayed publication of one column of which I was particularly proud until the editor found an opposite viewpoint from a San Francisco columnist. The paper ran both pieces. Mine was edited (gutted, really) while the other ran in its entirety. I could see the writing on the wall, and it didn’t take too long until my column was a thing of the past.
I was told that I could write on any subject or event so long as it happened within the physical county boundaries. I felt that the newspaper failed to recognize that readers had a much wider view. I told the paper to call me back when the federal government had money in the bank, world peace was solved, UFOs were explained, and cancer was cured — and all done within Shelby County.
A restricted world view is dangerous. Once most Americans felt that the Democratic party was more allied to the working man and the Republican party was more allied with business. The opposite is true today, and — in light of the tech industry — bigger is not necessarily better. The last four years saw more opportunity and support for American small business than in the last thirty years. It all boiled down to leadership.
I cite four American presidents: George Washington, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Patriots all, they loved their country. Washington was a landowner and a farmer; Truman and Trump were independent businessmen. Reagan headed the Screen Actors Guild and was a spokesperson for General Electric and governed California. He often called his state the fourth largest economy in the world. All knew the value of a dollar, the worth of a good day’s work and each appreciated the American worker. Moreover, all four had good common sense.
Of the paintings of George Washington, most of us recall the black and white rendering that hung in elementary classrooms. However, my favorite is Washington kneeling in the snow, praying for his troops — praying for guidance at Valley Forge. He sought God. He had faith. He led.
Truman took the presidency and led after FDR’s death. If you know anything about him, you know that one of his monikers was “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” I doubt if anyone came down on him for his colorful language or his blunt attitude. The sign on his desk in the Oval Office said it all. “The buck stops here.” A haberdasher by trade, Truman took to his new role and brought a sense of Midwestern wisdom, minus the folksiness elites now associate with
“fly over country.”
Reagan had a way with words, perhaps stoked by his acting background. Yet, all of his biographers reiterate his deep and abiding faith in God. God, country, family…. interminable values that have held this country in good stead for nearly 235 years.
Ronald Reagan strode forth with the movements of a much younger man and his persona intimidated Gorbachev at November, 1985 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Blustery weather saw Gorbachev in a heavy winter coat and Reagan in a suit. The striking contrast of a youthful looking Reagan and an old and tired Gorbachev was not lost on the world.
The bottom line? None of these presidents hesitated to extol the Lord. Each called on God to bless America, each thanked God for this nation, and each reminded us we are all created by that same, omnificent, loving God.
The press didn’t call Ronald Reagan “The Great Communicator” for no good reason. For all his speeches, perhaps the most important was his farewell address. Its entirety is much too long, so I offer excerpts and large font for emphasis.
(Courtesy State of Utah, State Library)
Ronald Reagan
Farewell Address to the Nation January 11, 1989
My fellow Americans:
This is the 34th time I’ll speak to you from the Oval Office and the last. We’ve been together eight years now, and soon it’ll be time for me to go. But before I do, I wanted to share some thoughts, some of which I’ve been saving for a long time.
It’s been the honor of my life to be your President. So many of you have written the past few weeks to say thanks, but I could say as much to you. Nancy and I are grateful for the opportunity you gave us to serve.
One of the things about the Presidency is that you’re always somewhat apart. You spend a lot of time going by too fast in a car someone else is driving and seeing the people through tinted glass—the parents holding up a child, and the wave you saw too late and couldn’t return. And so many times I wanted to stop and reach out from behind the glass and connect. Well, maybe I can do a little of that tonight.
People ask how I feel about leaving. And the fact is, “parting is such sweet sorrow.” The sweet part is California and the ranch and freedom. The sorrow—the goodbyes, of course, and leaving this beautiful place.
You know, down the hall and up the stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the President and his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning. The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mali and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that’s the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.
Something that happened to me a few years ago reflects some of this. It was back in 1981, and I was attending my first big economic summit, which was held that year in Canada. The meeting place rotates among the member countries. The opening meeting was a formal dinner for the heads of government of the seven industrialized nations. Now, I sat there like the new kid in school and listened, and it was all Francois this and Helmut that. They dropped titles and spoke to one another on a first-name basis. Well, at one point I sort of leaned in and said, “My name’s Ron.” Well, in that same year, we began the actions we felt would ignite an economic comeback—cut taxes and regulation, started to cut spending. And soon the recovery began.
Two years later, another economic summit with pretty much the same cast. At the big opening meeting we all got together, and all of a sudden, just for a moment, I saw that everyone was just sitting there looking at me. And then one of them broke the silence. “Tell us about the American miracle,” he said.
And in all of that time I won a nickname, “The Great Communicator.” But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation—from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I’ll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.
Common sense told us that when you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the people’s tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before. The economy bloomed like a plant that had been cut back and could now grow quicker and stronger. Our economic program brought about the longest peacetime expansion in our history: real family income up, the poverty rate down, entrepreneurship booming, and an explosion in research and new technology. We’re exporting more than ever because American industry became more competitive and at the same time, we summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad instead of erecting them at home.
Common sense also told us that to preserve the peace, we’d have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons—and hope for even more progress is bright—but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. The Persian Gulf is no longer a war zone. The Soviets are leaving Afghanistan. The Vietnamese are preparing to pull out of Cambodia, and an American- mediated accord will soon send 50,000 Cuban troops home from Angola.
The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.
Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.
When you’ve got to the point when you can celebrate the anniversaries of your 39th birthday you can sit back sometimes, review your life, and see it flowing before you. For me there was a fork in the river, and it was right in the middle of my life. I never meant to go into politics. It wasn’t my intention when I was young. But I was raised to believe you had to pay your way for the blessings bestowed on you. I was happy with my career in the entertainment world, but I ultimately went into politics because I wanted to protect something precious.
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: “We the People.” “We the People” tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. “We the People” are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the People” tell the government what it is allowed to do. “We the People” are free.
This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do these past eight years.
But back in the 1960s, when I began, it seemed to me that we’d begun reversing the order of things— that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the government was taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom. I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, “Stop.” I was a citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do.
I think we have stopped a lot of what needed stopping. And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.
(Speaking on Russia) …nothing is less free than pure communism…
(On his trip to Moscow….)
But life has a way of reminding you of big things through small incidents. Once, during the heady days of the Moscow summit, Nancy and I decided to break off from the entourage one afternoon to visit the shops on Arbat Street—that’s a little street just off Moscow’s main shopping area. Even though our visit was a surprise, every Russian there immediately recognized us and called out our names and reached for our hands. We were just about swept away by the warmth. You could almost feel the possibilities in all that joy. But within seconds, a KGB detail pushed their way toward us and began pushing and shoving the people in the crowd. It was an interesting moment. It reminded me that while the man on the street in the Soviet Union yearns for peace, the government is Communist. And those who run it are
Communists, and that means we and they view such issues as freedom and human rights very differently.
Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom– freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs production.
So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important — -why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “we will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did. ” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.
And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.
And that’s about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I
don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
We’ve done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren’t just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands.
All in all, not bad, not bad at all.
And so, goodbye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
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I am remiss if I neglect another quote by Ronald Reagan. It rings so true today:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
Another famous Reagan quip is this: “The most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ”
And so, I end with my comments on what is now called “The Woke” — that assemblage of individuals and groups moving to silence anyone who disagrees with them, a group that holds such beliefs that astonishes anyone with common sense and a good understanding of American and world history. Its “cancel culture” is absurd, violates any tenet of free speech, and undermines our Constitution.
It’s not the word “WOKE” that scares me. It’s the word WAKE.
What will the “Woke” leave in their wake?
It is not too late for us to combat this movement. No bad behavior persists if people step in to stop it. If we do nothing, why should they quit?
Be “Woke?” Never. Instead, BEWARE!
Think about it.