By Scott W. Winchell, SUA Editor-In-Chief
Stand Up America was created over five years ago by a former Army Major General named Paul Vallely who saw the destruction of our society occurring right under our noses, and the damage being done to our way of life by watering down the Constitution. The goal was to educate regular Americans of this slide into destruction, and to try and find a way to get the USA back on track.
He saw the decline as a military man who served our country for many years in many capacities, and knew he had to do something. He started by constructing a long term business plan that would seek to unite people of similar insight and determination. He knew early on from his war fighting experience that the only way to succeed was to unite forces and create a critical mass that would steer the country back.
It appears that he was not the only one. Happily, there are thousands who had similar ideas and the energy to try but, unfortunately, that means that thousands are doing the same thing, only separately. Separation of forces like this in the military means disaster. Poor communication, lack of supervision and guidance, duplicated efforts, redundancy after redundancy, and little or no funding is a recipe for failure.
Many efforts were made to unite these efforts over the past few years, unfortunately, with little success. Don’t get me wrong, there are some real success stories out there, but by and large, it has not produced that critical mass necessary for the reclamation of our Constitution and our society. Unfortunately there are other problems that are hurting the cause. These lie in the areas of ego, lack of focus, infighting, petty rivalries, deceptive practices, fraud, and stubbornness.
There are also the fringes out there where conspiracy theories abound. These are people who seem to have problems discerning fact from fantasy for whatever reason, and they steadily feed the internet with untruths, bogus stories, unbelievable tripe, and down right lies. These folks cannot be troubled by facts, they have made their minds up and nothing new or disproving of their beliefs will be accepted.
Then there is the media, and the left. The left recognizes the intertwining of these different efforts, good and bad, and regularly use these facts to paint anyone who does not believe as they do as crazies. They use terms like “birthers’, “truthers”, mobs, racists, “astro-turfers”, “tea baggers”, and many other derogatory names. And they are succeeding at marginalizing the more noble efforts in a guilt by association manner.
Some quick research that anyone can do on their own revealed some startling statistics. These simple search items are no doubt unscientific, but effectively prove the points above. For instance, on Facebook I searched for a few key words in the group category. The key words were: conservative, liberty, republican, and freedom. The results are listed below:
Search of Conservative groups on Facebook
This search hit over 500 separate conservative groups on FB.
Search of Republican groups on FB
This search hit over 500 separate Republican groups on FB.
Search of Liberty groups on FB
This search hit over 500 separate Liberty groups on FB.
Search of Freedom groups on FB
This search hit over 500 separate Freedom groups on FB.
Remember, each of these groups has their own list of members, sometimes in the millions, and most share the same membership in large measure. Being one of those efforts on Facebook, I see the same names across a multitude of endeavors. Friends start new groups every day, and limits on the site mean even more are created to continue past the limits in other ways. The effect is overload.
It is not uncommon for people to opt off because of the massive amounts of messages each are flooded by. Invariably, I get invited to at least one hundred new event notifications, group invitations, support messages, emails, tags, and more each day. It can be fun, but at some point it is beyond overload.
Each group, organization, campaign, and charity vies for the few available dollars out there. Further eroding the efforts of all.
Then there are the Tea Party folks.
America has gelled in one facet, the tea party movement. It is a grass roots effort like no other in the history of modern politics, and is impacting the system, but to what degree? Should it become a new political party on its own? Or, should it continue to grow as it does as key to changing the dialog in America. This effort has truly made some impact and we at SUA support it.
However, there are problems, some most of us know about, but there are some nuances that hurt the effort as described above. Is it really a good thing to endorse candidates? Is it really a good thing to run on the “Tea Party” ticket as a conservative? Will it achieve the critical mass necessary to truly change America, back from the brink? Well that remains to be decided, but it is not there yet.
Some of the more accomplished and organized units can be found here:
Blog Talk Radio
Then there is the world of amateur radio broadcasting. Blog Talk Radio is an ever growing phenomenon as well in the cause. There are thousands and thousands of shows streaming live, of which many are recorded and you can down load them to your I-pod and listen to them at your leisure.
Unfortunately, as good as many of them are, there much more that are not very good to be charitable. Some shows, like Matt Bruce’s Captain’s America show started on BTR and have since graduated to the big time. But these are rare indeed.
Audiences can run from a few listener’s to hundreds, but most get very little. The number of actual talk shows on conservative values is difficult to determine, but is is certain that there is a lot of effort being brought to the cause, but is that a good thing?
Conclusions
It is very difficult to say to someone that wants to make a difference to stop what they are doing and join a cause already well formed and accomplished. Some like to just get out on the web and vent their frustrations and we do not want to throw water on that kind of fire. But the fact of the matter is, we must come together as a united front, or we risk just muddying the waters further.
How do we do this? How do we choose the correct group? How does one determine what a group’s full slate of plans and ideas are? What if they do not believe everything I believe?
Well, the simplest answer is to get simple. Consider all your beliefs and boil them down to the bedrock, or core of your beliefs. Here at Stand Up America, we pride ourselves on having established that core, or bedrock. The Constitution and conservatism are our bedrock. Once we find our center, we can learn how we can fit in with the efforts of others. We cannot continue if we stubbornly try to get the country to resemble what we individually think it needs to be. We must get down to basics, so we can recover first, then argue details later.
Time to take it back. Join us, and we will join you for the betterment of all!
