A good read!!!!!!

          For the past few years, every Memorial Day, my family and I visit the Concord battlefield, a short drive from our home. It seems fitting, as it was here that Americans first fought -- and fell -- in the cause of liberty.

          The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson never fail to move me: "By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."

          "Here once the embattled farmers stood" -- not the intellectuals, not the media elite, not the Congressmen or the consultants -- but the yeoman farmers of New England. The British disdained them -- called the "gullies," Scottish for peasants. But they weren't peasants; they were small landowners, who were educated (they had the Bible and Shakespeare), church-going, patriotic and ready to defend their rights to the death. In fact, those "embattled farmers" were the middle class of 18th century America.

          They were also the Forgotten Americans of their day. They were taxed without their consent. Their elected assemblies were abolished. Troops were quartered in their homes. And the Redcoats were coming to confiscate their guns. On April 19, 1775, those forgotten Americans had their revenge -- at Concord's North Bridge and on the long, bloody British retreat, all the way back to Boston.

          It ended six years later at Yorktown, when the British struck their colors and their regimental bands played a popular marching song called "The World Turned Upside Down."

          I don't care what the history books tell you, the American Revolution did not start in Philadelphia in 1776. While the Declaration of Independence was crucial to the cause, and men like Jefferson and Adams were indispensable, revolutions are made by embattled patriots with muskets in their hands, who hold the bridge.

          Not far from here, there's a memorial to a man who lived and died for the Forgotten Americans of his time, including those Americans in chains. Go there, and you will find his words -- words which will endure as long as this republic stands -- chiseled in marble: "That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom... and that government of the people ... by the people ... for the people shall not perish from the earth."

          The expression the Forgotten American was first widely used during the Great Depression.

          There were stories of tycoons jumping from skyscrapers when the stock market crashed. The rich may have lost fortunes, but ordinary Americans lost everything -- jobs, homes, stores and farms. Farmers from the Dustbowl were thrown on the roads in a great migration. Others lived in shanties in Hovervilles, sold apples on street corners and ate in soup kitchens, or watched as their children went to bed hungry.

          I know. My father was one of them. He spent several years in the CCC -- the Civilian Conservation Corps.

          Those Forgotten Americans went on the rebuild our economy, win the Second World War and make the 20th century the American Century. Those forgotten Americans are now known as the Greatest Generation.

          Today, all too many Americans feel like aliens in our own country -- strangers in a strange land.

·       The Forgotten American of today is the worker taxed 40% of his income for schools that don't educate, courts that don't dispense justice and bureaucracies that destroy enterprise and annihilate freedom, as well as for benefits for hordes of uninvited guests who sup at our table.

·       They're the veterans who find anti-Americanism rampant (especially among the elites) and treason masquerading as dissent.

·       They're soldiers on the ground in Iraq, who are told by a majority in Congress that they're behind them all the way -- while they signal Al Qaeda to just hold on a bit longer and victory will be theirs.

·       They're parents who are told they have no say in their children's educations -- that the public schools have an absolute right to indoctrinate them in any foolish fad or social toxin.

·       They're Christians, whose people settled this land and founded this nation (on Judeo-Christian principles) who aren't allowed to have public displays of the Ten Commandments or prayers in public settings.  They've seen Christmas become the Incredible Shrinking Holiday -- in a nation that's 90% Christian.  Meanwhile, one party tells Christians that Islam is the "religion of peace," while the other says that, if they assert themselves too boldly, they are the moral equivalent of Islamic terrorists.

·       They're the second and third-generation Americans --whose ancestors came here legally, and learned our language, identified with our history and heritage, and were proud and grateful to call themselves Americans -- who are now asked to press one if they wish to continue in English, and who are forced to endure the spectacle of hordes of illegals demanding their so-called rights -- to legalization of their status, to bring in their extended families, to benefits they never earned, to parade with their national flags while shouting anti-American slogans  in our major cities and to destroy our national unity and turn America into a multi-lingual, multi-cultural boarding house.

·       They're the blue-collar and white-collar workers who see their jobs sent overseas -- the casualties of outsourcing, plant relocation and corporate downsizing -- whose reward for years of faithful service is a pat on the back and a pink slip.

·       They're law-abiding hunters, sportsmen and collectors who are told that -- merely by exercising their Second Amendment rights -- they are responsible for urban anarchy and mass murder on college campuses.

·       They're voters who have seen their democratic decisions overturned by judicial fascists determined to force their values on people who never took a course in constitutional law but have something they manifestly lack -- common sense and a sense of fair play.

·       They're ordinary people who are harassed by brainless celebrities lecturing them about their responsibility for global warming and advising them to use one sheet of toilet paper on visits to the bathroom -- while they build homes with 40-car garages and travel in private jets.

·       They're the hardworking entrepreneurs, struggling to establish small businesses, who find themselves punished with a double tax for Social Security.

·       They're young workers who are forced to pay into a Social Security system which will be bankrupt long before they retire, because one party demagogues on the issue and the other lacks the guts to oppose them.

·       They're the decent, moral, responsible Americans who see our culture sliding into the sewer -- with pornography on cable television, middle-school children plied with condoms and dissent from polymorphous perversion criminalized.

     The Forgotten American has been exploited and betrayed by both political parties. One is so blinded by a utopian vision that it's oblivious to the suffering its ideology inflicts.  To achieve its un-American agenda, it's willing to keep pounding round pegs into square holes until our freedoms are obliterated.

     The other party has turned principles like limited government, balanced budgets, national security and family values into empty campaign slogans. Its platform can be summarized in seven words: Stay in power until the next election.

     You know who else has failed the Forgotten American? The conservative movement. Many of us are living 20 to 40 years in the past. We've been slow to acknowledge that the problems of the Great Society and Reagan era aren't the problems of today. Our message hasn't kept pace with the times.

     And on issues like immigration, globalization and Israel, many of us are afraid to oppose an administration which increasingly seems to be sleepwalking through history.

     Instead of an independent voice, some of us have become happy-days-are-here-again cheerleaders for one political party. We've allowed its leaders to cynically manipulate and exploit us. We're more concerned about participating in a White House conference-call than in doing what's good for America. We're more concerned with the opinion of a media which despise us than in following the dictates of conscience. We dread being called extremists, radicals, hateful and homophobic. We let our fears determine our strategy and shape our message.

     And so we have failed. We've failed to educate. We have failed to inspire. We have failed to lead and to win.

     We have failed to understand that to be an authentic conservative today is to be an outcast, to be a rebel like those embattled farmers standing at Concord's North Bridge.

     Revolutions are made by patriots, not by lapdogs, not by those who crave social acceptance, not by those who are afraid of name-calling, not by those who are willing to compromise on their core values, and surely not by those who put partisan interests above their allegiance to God, family and country.

     If the alliance, the coalition that many of us hope and pray will come out of this meeting is to succeed, we must embrace the Forgotten American -- the patriot, the veteran,  the soldier, the parent, the small businessman, the displaced worker and the middle class families struggling with taxes and energy costs.

     We must make their cause our cause. We must find new ways to reach them with our message. In the words of Winston Churchill we must "Never, never, never give up."

     It's time for us to pick up our muskets and take a stand on that rude bridge with those embattled farmers -- the Forgotten Americans of today.