I recently saw a short video piece put together by talk show host and political commentator Laura Ingraham.  It was brilliant in its simple, direct, in-their-own-words approach.  And, frankly, it gave me some serious heebie-jeebies.

It wasn’t about impending financial doom, or nuclear attack – it was an audio side-by-side of Presidents Carter and Obama. It was political Déjà vu - and we should all be concerned with the similarities.

The Carter Administration ran this country into the ground, but we recovered.  The Obama Administration seems hell bent on spending us into oblivion in order to fix a spending problem. The Administrations in-between kept kicking the economic can down the road until here we are.   And we keep voting them in…

“WTF” as campaign slogan initials right about now…  so incredibly appropriate.

I was a young girl when Jimmy Carter entered the White House.  He’s the first President I remember hearing speak as a child.  We tied yellow ribbons around trees in my home town during the Iran hostage crisis, and celebrated their release (20 minutes after Reagan’s inaugural address)  while taking them down.  Memories of my brothers and me, trying to keep ourselves occupied (and out of our parents’ anger zone), waiting in line for hours to get gas, are firmly etched in my mind.  We knew our parents were struggling to pay the bills, even resorting to food assistance from our church at times.  They were not just on edge… they were angry and scared for our future.

I remember my Dad’s intense disgust with how Carter handled things, while talking to the Public and everyone else like we were incapable of understanding his version of reality.  The political tension was so thick in the air that you could almost taste it… and I mean everywhere.  We were an entire generation growing up afraid of Iran and Russia and the future.  We couldn’t escape being inundated with bad news – and they still ran nuclear bomb drills in school back then.  The word inflation was everywhere in the media, and at 7 years old I learned what it was.  This is not the kind of history you’d generally want to see repeating itself, yet here we are.

During a February ’86, Senate Campaign Fundraiser for Former Governor Christopher S. (Kit) Bond….  President Reagan said:

“And in 1986, as never before, we Republicans need to put forth our top-of-the-line candidates like Kit Bond. This election will determine whether or not our country keeps moving forward with economic growth, expanding opportunity, and freedom for all our citizens or slips back into the morass of tax and tax and spend and spend. The bad old days of runaway inflation, economic decline, and national despair are long gone, but the crowd of big spenders and big taxers who created that mess are still lurking in the wings. They held out the dream that big government could solve every problem, that Federal money was somehow free money, that the American economy was a horn of plenty which could be taken for granted. Usually when people grow up, they quit believing in the tooth fairy.”

Politics aside – our future is at stake.  If we fail at fixing our corrupted and broken system of Government, we will have failed our posterity.  That absolutely cannot be an option.

My son is, now, only a year older than I was at the end of Carter’s Administration.  His is the generation growing up in a post-9/11, TSA check required world.  Though I do not want them to go through what we went through, I fear they will go through far worse.  Unless we do something about it, that is.  And do something about it before it’s too late.

Please watch Ms. Ingraham’s video and read the full remarks from President Reagan.  Then decide for yourself if we are seeing our history repeat itself.  If we continue to allow the same mistakes to  be made, the American Dream may become our Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare.

It’s up to us to truly facilitate positive change…  Get informed, get involved and get your government under control!