Cameron Brown: Home on the range
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The state song of Kansas is the unofficial anthem of the American West, “Home on the Range.” The most memorable lines penned by the song’s author, Dr. Brewster M. Higley, appear in the chorus — “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, And the sky is not cloudy all day.” It’s a symbolic statement of American optimism—that compelling “Frontier Spirit” that placed a man on the moon and sent medical missions around the world.
How is that spirit faring in America today? We need an encouraging word from our national leaders, and we need clarity of purpose in the direction we are being led. Most of all, we need a down-range vision to ensure the American dream with its principles of equality, freedom and liberty is bequeathed intact to future generations. In a letter to his wife, Abigail, John Adams wrote: “Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.”
As Adams peers down from the celestial realm, he sees we have jettisoned an “America First” policy for an “America Last” policy. When the eastern Ukrainian border is prioritized over a porous and abandoned southern U.S. border, what is one to think? Billions of American dollars have been spent to protect Ukraine’s border while our southern border goes begging, abandoned and unprotected. Our deep sympathy with the Ukrainian people aside, the policy that fuels a proxy war with Russia has neglected what is actually in America’s vital interest—the protection of our southern border. The surge of illegal border crossings has gained critical mass and is now an active invasion with little remedy in sight. Lest we forget, Immigration is a permissive policy of our government not a mandatory one.
A native of Kansas himself, President Eisenhower left the White House with a warning prescient for its relevance today. He said, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist ... only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Protection, like charity, begins at home. Protection of the American people is required of our national leaders, and border protection is the litmus test of that charge. It’s time to re-direct our misplaced power and return it here at home, on the range of our southern border. John Adams is watching!
— Cameron S. Brown is president of the Kalamazoo Abraham Lincoln Institute and a former Michigan State Senator. Follow him at HistoryFrontiers.blog.
This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Cameron Brown: Home on the range
