From pioneers to pansies ~ By Patrice Lewis

But if the government takes away the struggles, no lessons are learned. People will make the same mistakes over and over again because there are no consequences to those mistakes. Instead the "mistakes" become a way of life because, hey, they work.

In Wayne Allyn Root's sobering essay "Why the Greatest Depression of All Time Has Begun," he explains why a future economic crash would be endlessly worse than the Great Depression. "In 1929 children had hope for the future. Today they are hopeless, helpless and clueless – an entire generation that only knows drugs, gangs, rappers, government handouts, teen pregnancy – and it goes downhill from there."

Our only hope to regain our pride, our self-worth and our pioneer spirit is to roundly reject any and all government entitlements.

It's sink or swim time, folks. Laura would agree.

Despite the brutal heat (actually, it's not really all that bad today! I love it hot!), I was highly motivated to do some chores outside today. I am sure that this column by Patrice Lewis had something to do with it. I felt that pioneer spirit today. I felt the need to take care of my private property. I mowed the lawn, and am in the process of clearing out some overgrowth. It gives me a sense of pride. And that, my friends, is why entitlement programs will never work. There is no motivation to take care of property when you have no stake in it.

I could only conclude one thing this morning after reading this column, and then sweating it out in the process of the work I was doing: We can choose to let the government take care of us, or we can choose to get off our butts and work a little harder, and do the best we can with what we have. I choose the latter.

In this column, Patrice pointed out the obvious, but yet it probably isn't something we always keep in mind. We need to keep that pioneer spirit going, because it leads to freedom! The entitlement mentality leads to dependency, which ultimately results in slavery, the opposite of freedom.

Overcoming struggles and challenges makes us stronger. Imagine that! Okay, I could go on and on about some of the things that I had going through my mind while reading this wonderful piece! I'm just hoping that it will motivate you, too, to be a pioneer and a patriot, and not a pansie! I'm just sayin'...

From pioneers to pansies

PATRICE LEWIS

By Patrice Lewis

June 04, 2011 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2011

Do you remember your Laura Ingalls Wilder books? I don't know about you, but these classic stories of a pioneer childhood give me a full-blown inferiority complex. Looking over what Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline (and later Laura and her husband) did in a normal day's work puts me to shame. With little more than a few hand tools and a lot of know-how, they created homes from bare dirt and grew their own food. They tried to depend on no one because often there was no one around to depend on. What they couldn't afford they did without. When they did borrow money, it often got them in trouble and they regretted it.

The Ingalls family tried never to be "beholden" to anyone. The only time they ever took a government handout was when they participated in the Homestead Act.

In the sequels to the "Little House" series, written by Rose Wilder Lane's heir, Roger Lea MacBride, Laura and her husband, Almanzo, moved to Missouri, bought land and spent many years making it into a productive farm. In these books, Laura speaks disparagingly about the Homestead Act. "It's a sin and a shame what the government in Washington did to folks, promising them free land," Laura says. "Free land indeed. It only shows that no good ever comes of getting something for nothing. It nearly ruined my pa, and look what it did to us. Every soul ought to pay his way in this world. It's the only honest and true way to live."

What would Laura have to say about the extensive welfare and entitlements rampant today?

In Thomas Sowell's column "Myths about the 'poverty-stricken,'" he says, "We don't need to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance."

And why, any sane person should ask, would the government want to expand the welfare state? What good are millions of welfare people to the government? What kind of money trail should we follow?

"The goal," continues Sowell, "is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus. … 'Entitlement' is just a fancy word for dependency." [emphasis added]

I see this dependency as one of the major stumbling blocks against this country ever regaining the independent pioneer spirit we once possessed. Entitlements and the dependency it creates are bringing this nation to its knees, both financially and morally. Indeed, for millions of people, it has already done so.

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