Gratitude

We should be grateful for every day that we have. No day has been promised us or owed to us. The attitude of gratitude is preferable to the attitude of resentment of blaming someone else for where we are. Every day is a gift.

I am also grateful for the privilege of living in the United States of America. It is a country of vast, unrealized potential, the rule of law, economic opportunity and the ability to succeed and fail. The remarkable occurrence is not that we are knocked down, but that we get back up and try again.

Common Humanity

The core of my campaign is our common humanity. Common humanity can be explained in a religious and a non-religious manner whichever one appeals to you most. The religious manner is that we are all sisters and brothers, children of God!

The non-religious manner was explained by President Bill Clinton at my daughter’s college graduation in May, 2017. He pointed out that ninety-nine point six percent (99.6%) of our DNA is identical. It is the point four percent (.4%) that we see. We have so much more in common than we have that is different.

This is our common humanity. We have more that unites us than separates us. The Republican Party can be the Big Tent Party to cover all of us, and that is the platform that I have laid forth in the site www.SaveConnecticut.com. What has alarmed me beyond the budget impasses in Hartford and the 47^th worst fiscal ranking of Connecticut, is political correctness, identity politics and the illiberal winds of intolerance blowing across our college campuses and threatening to blow into our local communities.

Identity politics are pushed by the .4 percenters, who wish to divide us by race, class, ethnicity, gender, creed, etc. Theirs is a poison to our cohesiveness as a nation. In fact the New Republic magazine recently sounded the battle cry that “[i]dentity politics isn’t the problem for Democrats. It’s the solution.” November, 2017 ed., p. 14. I reject their divisive politics and ask that Republicans, Democrats and Independents join my campaign for our common humanity. Identity politics exercised in other countries has led to great human suffering.

We stand in good company as former Ambassador to the United Nations and former Mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, along with James A. Baker III, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2017,  Identity Politics are Tearing America Apart! Our common humanity is the antidote for the poison of identity politics and the .4 percenters. Mssrs. Young and Baker correctly quoted Martin Luther King’s 1965 commencement address at Oberlin College: “Americans must learn to live together as brothers and sisters. Or, we will perish together as fools.”

The answer to divisive politics is: Our Common Humanity!

Liberty

Liberty represents freedom in our personal and economic spheres. There are the liberties in our Bill of Rights of freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion. These are human rights for which a constitutional government was conceived to guaranty those rights. Liberty has also meant the right to keep the product of your own work in the form of free labor. No man or woman should be subject to the control of any other man, woman or state! When that occurs, terrible things happen. A constitutional government was founded on this continent, not a monarchy or rule by man, but rather rule by law. Now we are confronted with The Administrative State with too many laws that threaten to make us its vassal. Every year we are promised a little bit of security in exchange for a little bit of our freedom. Cumulatively, this deal with the devil will kill us.

Where were we in 1975 vis-à-vis the state? Where are we today? At the accelerating rate of laws, rules and regulations, what will be left or our personal and economic freedoms in 25 years, 50 years or 100 years? We must collectively push back against this plethora of laws, rules and regulations that threaten to eliminate our liberty and suffocate our economy. Why should someone stay in Connecticut, if they can have more freedom/liberty in another state?

Should I become governor, Connecticut will be open for business! The business of Connecticut will be business and not government! We will have more jobs for our citizens.

Peter Thalheim,
Candidate for Governor, 2018
Maj, JAG Corps, USAR, ret.
www.SaveConnecticut.com