Dear Editor, (Not printed in WTimes. Submitted April 21, 2022)
I look forward to
Newt Gingrich’s three additional columns calling “for a dramatic shift in American
political and government system” (An American majority, not a Republican majority,
April 21, 2022). He gained my solid support
when he publicly apologized six months prior to Sept. 11, 2001, for his Contract
for America proposal to “eliminate” our federal government’s “Department of Education. He went on that day to suggest that we ‘not
only pay teachers more, but we should also be paying students to learn.’
As one of the seven
Republicans on President Clinton’s three bipartisan reports on “US National
Security in the 21st Century” he and others were unanimously
convinced that the top future national security threat to the US homeland was
terrorism. And that ‘Americans should
prepare to die in large numbers on American soil’. And, our second greatest threat was a lack of
education in our High Schools and Colleges.
They were not yielding a reliable supply of educated citizens, scientists,
and engineers capable of building and operating the weapons systems we would
need to give the rapid changes in technology that were coming. Nor the economic base needed for affording the
advanced system essential for defending our nation’s security, or effectively running
our government agencies for all other needs.
Unfortunately, the
majority of Congress and the American public ignored these clear and uncontested
warnings. Since then, other clear warnings
have also been ignored. So much so, that a survey of our nation’s top national
security experts two years before Trump’s election, concluded that our own “government
dysfunction” was our nation’s second greatest threat. Terrorism was again first. China, Russia, Iran, N. Korea and Climate
change were lower. So much for surveys.
But I have no
reason to doubt Mr. Gingrich’s surveys. I
sincerely look forward to his proposed solutions to “permanently change” our
increasingly dysfunctional system so we can finally form “a more perfect
union” and at least
improve on, if not achieve the six intentions stated in the following 25 words of
our Constitution’s Preamble.
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