NATION: Ignoring Eisenhower
Coeur d'Alene Press | UPDATED 14 years, 7 months AGO
Lincoln and Eisenhower are two of my heroes. Neither would have anything to do with today's Republican Party. Have you read Eisenhower's "Farewell Address to the Nation?" Eisenhower was not speaking about foreign enemies. He spoke to the dangers of economic, social and political concentrations of power in the hands of the military, industrial and financial sectors of our nation. But Americans slept through Eisenhower's Farewell Address, and now we pay the price.
The "Party of Lincoln" is no more. It has been buried under an avalanche of avarice, greed, lust for power and overweening pride of the military, industrial, financial complex. The right-wing has crossed a Rubicon into a region of mental, emotional, social, economic, financial and political constructs the United States fought World War II to defeat.
That war continues today within our own nation, testing whether our nation can defeat the materialistic authoritarian constructs of those who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Today, the American people find themselves on the horns of an ethical dilemma. Have the American people allowed capitalism at extremis to drag our society into a godless materialism from which catastrophe can be the only result? When did labeling compassion for one's fellow man as socialistic become a Christian tenet?
Unless Americans can succeed in using Free Enterprise responsibly, it will destroy our republic and the American Dream. Monopolistic capitalism, which is simply free enterprise gone berserk, is like an out of control nuclear reactor. It will produce an explosion nobody wants to experience. Its deadly fallout will be ubiquitous.
J. ALBERT ROWE