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How Will YOU Save America?
Where did it all start going wrong?
You look at what’s happened to our beloved country and despair of ever seeing America recover from the rot and decay that infests its once-proud institutions. You wonder if we’ll ever achieve the same prominence on the world stage. You mourn the loss of real civilizational progress that marked the United States and made us a world superpower.
You’d like to enjoy the decline, but even joy has been stripped from you. The future’s so blight you’re kind of dismayed.
Here’s the set-up, bub.
You’ve just stolen my time machine*, and now have the opportunity to go back in time and change the outcome of one historical event in the past in order to SAVE AMERICA in the present and the future.
Where/When do you go, what event do you change, and how does this fix everything?
Or, to put it another way, what’s the key moment in history that set us on this dread course, and how would a different outcome change things?
I’m torn on preventing the Hart-Cellar Act or preventing the election of state senators by popular vote.
Off of the top of my head, anytime to prevent Wilson from becoming President and stopping the Progressive amendments. I’ll have to think harder to find the proper time.
I also appreciate the time machine meme where the man says, “President Coolidge, here are some antibiotics.”
Well, I’d go back and reverse the election of 1964. I wasn’t a big fan of Goldwater but if he would have won, we would have been spared the effects of the Great Society. I believe that the Great Society was the source of many of our ills because of the Government takeover of much of our country. Google it and see how much it cost us.
That’s a big wish. Because of some of Barry’s ill-timed remarks he lost by a landslide.
I’d go back to New Jersey 1902 and stop Woodrow Wilson from becoming President of Princeton University. Without his perch at Princeton, he never would have become Governor of New Jersey; never would have become president.
Wilson set us on a dangerous course upon which we are still reeling: The income tax; direct election of senators; government by “experts;” all can be tied to the execrable Woodrow Wilson.
Edited to add this Wilson gem: “The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” It all started at Princeton.
The good @bishopwash and @addictionisachoice have given the answer I would have given: Prevent Woodrow Wilson from becoming POTUS. I think AddictionIsAChoice’s answer is better because I believe it was at Princeton where Woody more fully developed his theories on how to “properly” govern the US.
Thanks for giving me a time and location.
I don’t know if it can be saved in the sense that it reverts back to at least the 1980s. Horses, barns, and some such.
There are too many things to choose from and I have no problem with those listed so far, but for me, I’d stop Ted Kennedy and the 1965 immigration reform act.
The constitutional convention. I would have them add an amendment that prohibits the federal government from wealth redistribution at the federal level. If states want to do it, that’s their business. But, no more vote buying with “social welfare” programs. The Founders missed this all-important restraint on the federal government and we’re paying (and paying and paying) for it now. They needed to get well ahead of Wilson. This is the Achilles heel of our system of government.
And, while I’m at it, I’d strengthen the selection of senators by state legislatures.
I like this one because it affects so many very important items.
What about going back a little further and saving McKinley. McKinley continues to have a successful two term presidency with stable foreign policy and economic expansionist domestic policy. Slows down TR and the progressives by four years maybe even moderates some of their actions and TR and Taft can’t fight causing the election of Wilson. Additional bonus is McKinley gets to live out a natural life.
Nice!
Did no one else pick up on that?
Oh we can go back in time? Well then I would burned that useless piece of parchment as soon as it came out into the State House yard and strangled J. Marshall in his bloody crib.
Edit: Got my Marshalls mixed up.
I’d prevent John F. Kennedy from signing the executive order allowing government employees to unionize.
Have you ever read “The Return of William Proxmire” by Larry Niven?
That was the great mans’s son, wasn’t it? Streptococcal cellulitis from playing tennis? Or does my memory fail me?
I’d strangle Saul Alinsky in his crib.
Since it has not been yet suggested: Kill Karl Marx
Not to mention…
Yep. Only 100 years ago and a President’s son dies from an infected blister.
Love the picture in the post – and the original movie. There is no point in history that spawned his change. I think human nature has always been the same and done the same things. Just the dress in the window changes. The same issues plaguing our country are plaguing the world. A spiritual lens has to be included with the historical. The answers are all there. We’re actually privileged to be born for a day and time such as this. Take your place on the front lines – stand firm and have courage. There are no desk jobs behind the front lines……..
Based, as the kids say.
I’m surprised the answers are skewing so heavily toward the political and economic. I think America’s decline is a form of civilizational suicide. Every developed country on the globe is killing itself in much the same way. Man is committing civilizational suicide because it’s in his nature to do so. He would’ve done it long ago, but only now has he discovered the right tools. Thus, the best way to “save” America would be to keep it from existing in the first place.
But if I had to choose just one president to kill, Wilson wouldn’t be a bad option.
Well, that’s perfectly gloomy.
The Terminator himself – not just the movie – said that.
Yeah, but if you have another bullet to spend, don’t overlook LBJ. Not only was he behind the Great Society, he and McNamera’s policy of “escalation” in Vietnam put us in a quagmire that lasted for 10 years.
Now, don’t start with “what ifs” concerning JFK. It was on LBJ and no one else.
On Feb. 29, 2012, I would like to have been following Andrew Breitbart around, in an ambulance if necessary, and/or with life-saving equipment.
Hopefully, this will not be seen as an attempt at humor. You can have your politicians, but Andrew was a force who “got it” (famously: “Politics is downstream from culture”) and was just getting started. We lost a lot then when we could ill afford to lose it.
Yes, and maybe Rush, though he was usually preaching to the choir it seemed. Still, he ticked off the right people.
I’ve begun to question that aphorism.
Politics seems to be influencing the culture more than the culture influences politics these days.
But part of the reason for that is because there are few if any aspects of culture that remain unpoliticized.
1980 – see that Reagan picked a conservative warrior and leader as his running mate. He felt going in to convention he needed to unite the party a little more and reach out some to the establishment to win. As it was, he didnt and we would have much better served to have a true conservative leader follow him with two more terms to hopefully solidify things instead of having that brief moment that the establishment began to undo as it reached back to an imaginary “middle”.
Sadly, if time travel and changing the past is possible, then the reality we are living is already what someone else thinks is the best of all possible lines.
Without teachers unions, the Left might not have captured the public education system at all. Same for their funding of Democrats. That would have improved the culture.