This is no time for nice...

...and peace -- of mind, of heart -- is a luxury we are denied.

Our own party leadership seems determined NOT to learn the lessons of their failures in the past two elections. They prefer instead to blame us, their party, for "having moved too far right," of having abandoned principles they cannot even articulate any longer with a straight face.

If we can overcome these enemies within our own ranks, we are still faced with an opposition party and its compliant media willing to demonize us at every opportunity, and a public jaded and lazy enough in large part to accept their accusations at face value for convenience's sake.

And if we overcome THAT obstacle, we will still be faced with the world our opponents within and without have saddled us with, a world of such catastrophic debt that it beggars the imagination along with everything else, grossly enlarged government involvement in almost every aspect of our lives, from our jobs and our education to the preservation of our very flesh, a world in which at least one and as many as three terrorist states will have possession of nuclear weapons.

So peace... is a memory for our generation now. We need to accept that. We need to embrace it... and, if the generations to come are to have any future at all, we need to thrive in it.

It's time to embrace words written by another man, in another generation, that have become relevant again, with renewed weight because we thought we could forget them:

Give me, my God, what you still have;
give me what no one asks for.
I do not ask for wealth, nor success,
nor even health.

People ask you so often, God, for all that,
that you cannot have any left.
Give me, my God, what you still have.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.
I want insecurity and disquietude;
I want turmoil and brawl.

And if you should give them to me,
my God, once and for all,
let me be sure to have them always,
for I will not always
have the courage to ask for them.


Corporal Zirnheld
Special Air Service
1942