My wife and I took our son to the Space Needle to celebrate his 16th birthday last week. As I gazed down on Seattle I was struck by two thoughts: everything I saw was somebody’s dream and somebody’s risk.

The P-I building, Safeco Field, the monorail, even the Pink Elephant Car Wash. Each started as a dream and at some point someone took a financial risk to make it happen. Then I thought about our country. That’s the way we started: 56 men penned the Declaration of Independence and pledged “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

They took a risk called America. It costs them a great deal to get E Pluribus Unum but today our leaders have traded it for political correctness. Our leaders have taken the dreams and risks away from us, the people, created a welfare state and spent our children’s capital on failed institutions.

They see the judiciary as a means to set policy instead of interpret the Constitution. They see the legislative body as a career with benefits which surpass anything our forefathers ever envisioned. They see the executive office as an opportunity to lead America away from our heritage, and use its sacred loft to see how much risk can be transferred from Americans to the government.

God-fearing, big-dreaming, risk-taking, law-abiding Americans made us great, not gold-spending government. It’s time to take back our institutions from those who live in the self-destructive delusion that more government is the answer, that you can spend your way out of debt, or that we need to apologize for what our great nation has done for others in the name of liberty.

Clay Miller

Oak Harbor