by Jared Chamberlain

Created on: December 30, 2008

*As I sat down to compose this brief work, The Networks were projecting that Barack Obama would be our next President. As the nearly 1 million people gathered in Chicago's Grant Park that evening, and video of Obama-mania inundated our senses, I could not help but be reminded of the expression, "how soon we forget."*

We are seeing the "change" occurring before our eyes; the change that Mr. Obama has so eloquently orated to us for the past year and a half. The obscure, vaguely defined and mostly ominous change of the fundamentals of America, as Obama himself put it just recently. The lullaby "Change" by which we have been rocked to sleep. We have progressed, or rather, digressed, from the Greatest Generation of our parents and grandparents who survived the Great Depression, took to the factories and the battlefields to secure victory in WWII, who guided our nation through the uncertainty of the Cold War, and who are now paralyzed with confusion about the state of the country.

They are witnessing a "change" in the mindset of their children and grandchildren. That mindset is the idea that one works to attain a modest living for themselves and their family, that you and you alone, with a little of God's grace, are responsible for your success and well-being. The mentality that the government can neither give you happiness nor be responsible for your misery. This mentality has devolved into a dangerously utopian mindset for the majority of Americans. A devolution to the idea that the government ought to be large enough to give you all you want, while forgetting that this inevitably means that it is also powerful enough to take it all away. Yes, with this election, Americans have cried out for a nanny state, and it has been given to them. They have pleaded for this modern-day Savior to give them all they need. They beg, "please bail out my bank," "pay off my mortgage," "buy my groceries," "give me free health care." And it has and will be done (some of which under the Bush administration, of which I do not claim to be a fan). Oh, how soon we forget.

To each according to his need! From each according to his ability! These are the commandments of the doctrine of Communism. Barack Obama boldly pronounces his "spread the wealth" ideology. Engels and Marx must be getting their long-awaited drop of ice water as Americans, full of youthful enthusiasm, have sucked in the high-minded elitism propagated in our liberal universities, creating an entire generation of twenty-somethings

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