Tomorrow it is a year to the day since we lost my dad. One day he was here and the next he was gone. Fortunately for him, he died in his sleep. Unfortunately for me, the loss is still something I cannot get my heart or mind around. I have saved his voice on my cell phone so that I don’t forget what he sounds like but I cannot rebuild his character or advice, and I need his advice right now. My dad passed on his values and patriotism to his children and those traits are what make my soul grieve for what we have already lost in this country, the land my father fought for and for which he watched his fellow patriots die.

At 85, his mind was still razor sharp and his memory could recall even small details like the spelling of a neighboring farmer’s name when my dad was only 15. So when you talked with him, his advice carried at least 70 years of life experience behind it. I want him to reassure me that we have not lost our country. He would always say that everything was cyclical. For instance, when the idea of global warming came out with Al Gore’s propaganda film, Inconvenient Truth, my father shook his head incredulously sharing stories of weather patterns he remembered and his knowledge of normal climate change over history’s eras. When Kerry was close to winning the 2004 election and I was beside myself with worry, he soothed me, “We can live through 4 or 8 years of anything,” assuaging me we could “undo” whatever insanity the Democrats applied to our democracy. This morning, when I read a piece in American Thinker like Let it Burn where author Demosthenes tells us, “The decline has begun, and now our nation must hit bottom,” and “Detoxing America will cause social, political, and economic strife of a sort unimaginable, and yet it is a process we must endure,” I want my dad to tell me we still have time to work our way through this and get back to liberty.

As Mark Steyn describes in America Alone, we are the world’s last vestige of hope. And I fear that island of freedom, once a bright flame, is but a small flickering candle about to extinguish. This was not mitigated by the despairing words of a young man at a conservative political meeting last night who a few months ago had lost his bid for the republican congressional primary. He said he had walked the streets and knocked on doors all over our county and was abhorred at citizens’ lack of knowledge of even who their own representatives were but even worse, he lamented, was their deficiency of caring or responsibility for the future. We know liberty begins at home, at the local level yet at home after home, he found little but apathy. He said people could no longer see the difference between republicans and democrats. While listening to him, I looked around the room at the earnest faces gathered there. The young man sitting next to me and the teacher across from me said this was their first political meeting. The young man asked, “What is the difference between political party and county jurisdictions?” Sitting across the table was a knowledgeable historian, 78, who reminded me of my father. He patiently explained to a small group of us about wards and boards and townships and precincts. “How,” I thought, “can we possibly make a difference if we are this naive in even where to start?” And this is what liberals count on–that even those of us who want to fight come to table with only our convictions and little knowledge of even how to start when they’ve been planning for decades to take our country down.

Maybe this is what the first patriots felt when they began America’s first fight for freedom against the tyranny of England. In reading The 5,000 Year Leap, I am disheartened by how very, very far we have moved away from the founding father’s intentions. I hear of those re-writing the Continental Congress and I think, what a misspent use of time when getting back to what our forefathers ingeniously created is a time-consuming, laborious journey in and of itself. This is one of my great frustrations. Another is the idea of a third party which would ensure a democrat win in 2010 and 2012.

But the largest frustration I hold is the apathy of those who think if they just vote the way of conservatism, it is all they have to do. This notion could not be more erroneous or dangerous. However uncomfortable it may be, we need boots on the ground, we need activists and freedom fighters. The small group of about 15 I was with last night needs to turn into 100. Yes, life and work does go on but those evenings relaxing in front of the television and those weekend outings must be balanced with the effort and exertion it takes to win back our local and then national liberty. We all have become too comfortable in our American existence. Many of us spend more time planning our next vacation than on how we will secure the sovereignty of our nation.

How bad will it have to be before some of us wake up? Do we know who our precinct committeemen are? Do we know how to become one? As Americans, do we know who our local representatives are? Do we know how they vote? Where can we volunteer locally or nationally?

I wonder what my father would say today one year later and closer to the tyrannical plan progressives have for us. Today the stakes are even higher and America is disintegrating from within. I wish I could talk to him again. I know at age 17, with Pearl Harbor a recent memory, my dad did not hesitate to put his life on the line to stand up for our country. And I wonder…

How can any of us do any less?