Life

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

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.

 

Love

Love is that we are all sisters and brothers, children of God!

The non-religious version 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 which is set forth in the site www.SaveConnecticut.com.

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.

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 to 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 and are set forth in our Declaration of Independence from 1776 and our Constitution from 1787. These 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 our 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 the Rule of Man, but rather the Rule of 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, that is a bad deal.

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?

Peter Thalheim,
Peter Thalheim for CT GOP Chair 2021
Maj, JAG Corps, USAR, ret.
www.SaveConnecticut.com