A Chicken in Every Pot

Until recently, there was one American virtue that almost everyone agreed with.  That virtue was hard work.  People from every generation, at every income level, of every race, and of every political philosophy agreed that our lives and
the future of our country have to be founded on hard work. But nobody talks about hard work anymore.
Apparently, hard work isn’t so important.  Apparently, it’s not even an American virtue anymore, because everything today is supposed to be “for free.”  After all, “the rich” are going to pay for everything!
When I was a boy, we were taught that the road to success went like this: Get a good education, start a business or get a good job, and work hard!  You will be a success!  But today, I’m not so sure that is the formula anymore.
After all, everybody has lots of rights today.  You don’t have to work hard.  In fact, you don’t have to work at all.  You don’t even have to put up the pretense of working.
We have a right to medical care, a right to housing, a right to food, a right to an education, a right to public transportation, a right to a free cell phone, and a right to just about everything else that can be imagined.
Most of all, we have a right to rights!  Not the rights found in the Bill of Rights or our Louisiana Constitution’s Declaration of Rights — the right to freedom of speech, the press, religion, and assembly, or the right to keep and bear arms.  In fact, I’m not sure we have those rights anymore.
Rather, we have the right to claim whatever we want — even though somebody else worked for and earned it.  In addition to all these “rights,” we are told that everybody deserves “respect.” And they want to be sure they are not “disrespected.”
When I was a boy, we were taught to respect other people — our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our pastors, our policemen, and our military.
We were taught that we had to earn respect through our behavior and our accomplishments.  But today, we are taught that we deserve respect, simply because we exist!
When he was running for President in 1928, Herbert Hoover promised us “a chicken in every pot.”  Unfortunately, his policies helped land us in the Great Depression.  Franklin Roosevelt took Hoover’s big government policies to a much grander level and kept us in a depression for nearly 10 years, until World War II forced us back to work.
Today, only 47 percent of all Americans work full-time.
The big question is, who’s gonna pull the wagon when everybody wants to ride?
Is it too late for America?
Maybe.  I’m not sure.  The talking heads remind us that America is today a very confused place.  A nation disintegrating before our eyes.
One of the problems is, we have lost the concept of what is a right.
The Declaration told us, “We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights.  That among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
But we don’t believe in a “Creator” anymore, do we?  And if there is no Creator, there are no natural rights. Today, “rights” are whatever the thug who seizes power says they are.  So there you have it.