By Bill Hawkins
The chairwoman of the local Democratic Party may have been a teacher of history, but there is a lot she did not learn from it, or chooses to ignore. Like so many left-wingers, she appears to be an admirer of the late, unlamented Soviet Union in spite of the fact that it murdered more of its own citizens than even Adolph Hitler, second only to Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist China.
I don’t know how old she is, but does she remember the tension we lived under for years with Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at us? Does she remember the Cuban missile crisis when the president from her party, John F. Kennedy, defied the Soviet Union and some thought would ignite World War III but forced the Soviets to back down? Does she remember that President Kennedy, a Democrat, was so convinced of the probability of Soviet nuclear attack that he urged us all to construct underground shelters to protect us from nuclear fallout and distributed government pamphlets showing us how to do it, and thousands of these backyard shelters were built, some right here in San Benito county? This all happened long before Ronald Reagan was elected president.
Reagan knew it was suicidal to let the U.S.S.R. get the upper hand with a nuclear arsenal and his policy did help to bring down the greatest danger we faced at the time and, much as the Democrats hate to admit it, we were and are safer as a result.
Do they really think we would be better off with Communist dictators still in power and their missiles aimed at us? If the United States had confronted Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese militarists with an arms buildup and the threat of force prior to World War II, it would have been risky and highly unpopular, but it very likely would have saved millions of lives.
Ronald Reagan recognized the principles upon which this country was founded – freedom for the individual, not a government imposed lifestyle-freedom to pursue the occupation of the individual’s choosing; freedom to own property; freedom to start a business; freedom to work for someone else if you choose. These principles enabled the young country to succeed, innovate and invent, far surpassing the “old world.” Reagan came in to reverse the malaise of the Carter administration when the U.S. was known as a “paper tiger” and interest rates were around 24 percent, and because he know that lower taxes would bring in more money to the government, not less, he set off one of the longest periods of prosperity in history. These American principles of freedom do, indeed, give you the opportunity to fail. But they also give you the opportunity to live the American dream, which you could never achieve under a socialist system, unless you climbed up in the government bureaucracy.
Bill Hawkins is a Hollister resident.
