Americans should keep speaking out

What do you do when you live in a world that seems upside down? Everyone reading this column knows exactly what I mean.

Scan the daily headlines - as most of us do - and you'll see and hear things that you never imagined possible.

Students in Colorado, in some warped multi-culture lesson, recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the words, "One Nation, Under Allah".

Also this week, a New Jersey school district is being sued to remove "One Nation, Under God" from the Pledge.

Seriously, I couldn't be making this up.

An NBA basketball franchise owner - truly a despicable man - will soon lose his team, along with his already sullied reputation, for words uttered in his home during a private conversation?

If we are to be punished for our private thoughts and conversations, then rest assured, we're all in trouble. No one among us has not had an offensive thought or conversation.

And now, according to a recent study, a majority of Americans accept as fact that our political leaders lie to us on a regular basis.

Yet we accept this upside down world?

All of us in our own way are searching for an answer or a solution to a problem that seems both out of control and beyond our means to solve.

And yet without a solution, the world that we leave to our children and grandchildren is a dismal and frightening prospect.

Show me one person who believes this country today is a better place to live and raise children than in the past?

The frustration and utter contempt should not be isolated to our elected leaders. More and more each day we find that the national news media - both television and urban newspapers - are part of this complex fabric of lies and deception.

And that is to me the most perplexing and disgusting aspect of our steady slide down the ladder of respect and honesty on the world stage.

In a perfect world, we can elect new leaders to carry our interests and our values to the national arena.

But it's harder to undo the ownership of television networks who work hand-in-hand with the crooks and liars who steer our ship of state.

In my lifetime, I have come to believe that politicians say what you want them to say but do what best serves their self interests.

But I never believed that the national news media by and large simply could not be trusted to be honest and fair and yes, even balanced.

Never would I have believed this possible.

Way back a million years or so ago when I was in journalism school, today's excuse for a national media would not have been a remote possibility. Media members had political preferences, to be sure, but they rarely if ever allowed those partisan attitudes to seep into the news columns.

Today what parades as a national media is stoking the flames of distrust and for good reason.

Don't be silent, even if your voice is heard by a few.

The enemy is silence. The solution is for good people of good moral values to yell as loud and as long as the radical voices of "progressive change."