The End of America

This post will cover random thoughts about the hysteria surrounding the passage of healthcare reform. My fellow Evangelicals are in a tizzy now that it has passed. I’m hoping my words will add to their distress.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

“Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day . . . we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this, and if I don’t do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Who said this? John Boehner? Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Multiple Tea Party protestors? This quotation is from an LP vinyl recording entitled “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.” The 19-minute recording featured a 2,000-word, 11-minute, impassioned address by Reagan and was produced in 1961 to foment opposition to Medicare.

Right before the passage of the historic health care reform bill of 2010, John Boehner said, “This health care bill will ruin our country. It’s time to stop it.” I imagine that he’s about as prophetic as Ronald Reagan was on Medicare.