I was recently reminded of this post that I originally wrote on June 2, 2006. As I basked in the glory of my wonderful country this past July 4th, and reflected upon my recent encounter with my German friend, Ingrid, I thought this would be a very fitting piece to post again, as it is truly timeless: “The wussification of America.” Here it is again, in its entirety.
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I’m ashamed; I’ve been online all evening, ever since I got home from my good-paying American job. I’ve been checking email, writing friends, making airline reservations for my vacation coming up, buying books, copying code for my website, and all the while, I’m recording my favorite programs on TV.

Then everything goes black. Mind you, I live in the north Georgia mountains, so there are no street lights to illuminate my house. Mad? Hell yeah! Home phone (plugged into the wall) is dead – cell phone, thankfully, had a full charge. I immediately began calling the electric company to report the outage, and truthfully to bitch about it. Why, it has interrupted my life!!!!!!

Yes, I got the typical “all circuits are busy” recording, but continued to call as if it would make the repair come faster. On the 8th call, I got the “we realize there’s an outage in your area, and it will be repaired as soon as possible” recording. I was thinking, “What can I do to speed this up? This is going to take forever!… DAMNIT!” I was trying to find a flashlight to navigate my way around the house, and I’m mad as hell. How dare the electric company let an outage happen while I’m writing for my blog!?!?!?!? What an absolute inconvenience! Now I know I have to reset the clocks, the microwave, the VCR, and every damn thing else that keeps time with the flow of electricity.

Then I think about my PC! Oh, the horrors! OMG! I didn’t get to shut down properly! Did I lose everything on my hard drive? Did the last thing I was writing get lost? Did the monitor fry because of a surge? What will need replacing when the electricity is back?

Before I could even finish the above thoughts, the power came back on. PC, TV, microwave, clocks, etc. Yes, I had to change some of them, but I am lucky.

You see, in that brief 5-minute span, I was an American without electricity in my home. I was mad; mad as hell, by God, I pay my bills! Then I thought about a story I’d seen earlier about the “progress” in Baghdad on Fox News. They have a shiny, new power plant, that, for now, provides electricity for the citizens for at least 10 hours a day. Do you know that it is normally 115 degrees on any given day for this time period in Iraq? It was only 88 degrees here in Atlanta, and I’m bitching about not having electricity for ten minutes maximum.

What has become of us as a nation? I know it wasn’t just me, either, because on the 2nd to 7th call to the electric company, ‘all circuits’ were busy. Do we not appreciate the luxurious lives we have? Apparently not. I didn’t – but now I do.

The people of Iraq have risked life and limb to vote in the first democratic elections in five decades, yet we can’t get the same percentage of Americans to come out and vote for most given elections. We are a spoiled rotten bunch, and if we don’t change our ways, we’ll be thrown out with the garbage.

I vote conservative because I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – all 3 of which are of my personal choosing. It’s not owed to me by the government; it’s my personal responsibility to achieve all three. Herman Cain has a different and more precise take on it: Life, Liberty and Ownership. Without ownership of property and one’s own things, how can ‘happiness’ be achieved? That’s where the “Fair Tax” comes in to play. But I digress.

So my electricity went out and I was mad. Whose fault was that? The electric company’s, or mine? Truthfully it’s mine. I have to be prepared to have nothing, for that’s what I was brought into this world with – nothing. No TV, no computer, no clocks, ovens, cell phones, air conditioning, lights, etc. That is all a gift, my friends. It’s not owed to me. Don’t you think the people of Iraq think of it as a gift?

The average Iraqi citizen, mostly in Baghdad, would probably only DREAM of having what I have, even though it’s not much to me. That’s where my wussification is showing. I’m an ungrateful American, taking my liberties and freedoms for granted.

How would I feel if foreign soldiers were patrolling my streets? How would I feel if I had to live in fear of “snitching” on the opposition insurgents who wanted nothing more than to quash the freedom I so preciously desired and tasted on the day Saddam’s statue fell? What about my children who now had school books and materials they’ve never had before? …not to mention my girls who would now go to school, even though they are female?

The things I would not miss as an Iraqi woman would be the rape rooms, torture chambers, mass graves, and public mutilations carried out under Saddam’s tyrannical rule. The Iraqi men didn’t have it much better. How can you trust a president who gets 99.9% of the vote, and the .1% who didn’t vote for him are summarily executed?

Now today we have these stories of U.S. Military members possibly intentionally killing innocents. Would I rather be shot by a bullet to the head, or be raped, have my head cut off, or even burned alive? I’ll take the bullet any time. Are war-time deaths ugly? Yes they are. Are the unavoidable? No, they’re not. War is an ugly thing, and death happens. Winning hearts and minds is not easy, and we’re paying the price for such a philosophy. As with Viet Nam, if this war is lost, it will not be at the hands of the U.S. Military – it will be at the hands of an irresponsible media and the leftist peace-at-any-price crowd.

The wussification of America will be her undoing. Pray for the silent majority to be silent no more.

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done. ” – Ronald Wilson Reagan