Chuck Norris - Black Belt Patriotism: How To Reawaken America

Table of Contents

I would like to dedicate this book to two groups.

First and foremost, to my family. To my wife and best friend, Gena, for her unconditional love and dedication to me, and for the countless hours she spends in assisting me in a myriad of ways in life. There are not enough words or space to thank you my love for all you do. And to my seven children (Michael, Dina, Eric, Kelley, Tim, and our twins Dakota and Danilee) and ten grandchildren (Gabi, Dante, Hannah, Camrynn, Chloe, Max, Greta, Eli, Chantz, and Dustin), for providing me the joys of fathering, grandfathering, and a constant living reminder to keep having fun in life. I dedicate this book to you all, because it is for you that I joined the culture wars in hope of leaving you the legacy of a better America.

I secondly and similarly dedicate this book to the generation of Millennials, the young men and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, to whom we will leave the America weve been handed. It is my wish and prayer that Black Belt Patriotism will inspire you to rise up and bear the baton of our Founders America. You are the generational hope that the America of yesteryear can be reawakened and still be the America of tomorrow.

I LOVE AMERICA: always have, always will. But even the most patriotic among us will confess that America seems to have lost its way. As a people, we seem more divided than ever before. Switch on the television and its clear weve lost our moral compass. Our economy, once celebrated as a guarantor of freedom and prosperity, now seems corrupted by greed, materialism, and uncertainty. Other countries that used to envy us, now despise us. We seem to have lost not only our sense of ourselves but of our place in the world.

I dont claim to be a scholar. Im not a sociologist or a political scientist. I am just a concerned citizen who is extremely worried, as Im sure most of you are, about the direction our country is heading. I have watched our country changeand unfortunately, not for the better. When I was in school in the 1950s, what the teacher said to do, you did. No questions asked. The teacher was in charge, not the students. We would never think about being disrespectful, much less attacking a teacher. Boy has that changed now!

In the 1960s I watched prayer taken out of the schools. I watched the baby boomer generation rebel with the slogans, If it feels good, do it, and Dont trust anyone over thirty. They are now middle-aged parents. And while many of them have come to see the error of their ways, their permissiveness has rubbed off on their children, who have pushed the edge of promiscuity and liberal living that much further. The feel-good concept in the 1960s was drugs and sex, which has morphed into drugs, sex, and violence in an unfortunate downward spiral that is taking our culture in a direction that no sane person should want it to go. It is time for America to wake up and change this course.

I dont believe in whining. Im an optimist and I believe we can do better. I have outlined below the major problems I think our country faces, and in every chapter in this book Ill also provide what seem to me to be practical, real-world solutions that we can either do ourselves or pressure our politicians into doing (making them do the jobs we elected them to do).

I also believe the first step in fixing the mess were in is recognizing how we got here. And that means looking back before we can move forward. We need to learn from the past, from history, and most especially from the example of our Founding Fathers. I love American history, and over the last few years Ive gained a greater appreciation for our Founding Fathers. I, like many of you, went through much of my life with conservative beliefs, but really on the basis of instinct, experience, and common sense rather than with a philosophical grounding, beyond knowing a few guiding quotes from the Founders. Studying and researching more of Americas heritage has helped me gain a whole new appreciation for the Founders lives and opened my eyes to their old solutions for our new problems. Ill outline what those are and how I think we can achieve them.

The first step is to pick our battles. Ive narrowed it down to what I think are the eight most important challenges we face as a country and as a people. And they start with remembering who we are.

Americas first major problem is that we have forgotten our roots. Too many of us dont know or dont feel connected to those who founded our country.

In 2007, a national survey commissioned by the U.S. Mint found that only 30 percent of Americans knew that Thomas Jefferson was our third president, and only 7 percent could name the first four presidents in order. If youre a part of the 93 percent, they were George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The fact is most Americans dont have a clue why our Founders created this country, what principles motivated them, or why they framed our Constitution the way they did.

As citizens of this great country, we need to renew our understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We need to go back and study the debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. We need to examine other important documents of our history, like the Articles of Confederation, the Bill of Rights, and the Northwest Ordinance. We need to sit down and learn all the important American history we should have learned in schooland probably didnt.

You might not have thought it mattered then. But you have to understand that it matters now. If Americans dont know their constitutional history, then they wont care, or even acknowledge, that our constitution of liberty is being transformed into a charter for big government, which is exactly what has happened over a period of decades. You know that old saying, too many cooks in the kitchen? Thats how I feel about our representatives in Congress. There are too many cooks in the kitchen (535 to be exact), and even what theyve cooked is inedible. Ive seen them scream and squabble at each other until they had to have a time out, just like kids in grammar school. Another way to see federal government is like an octopus with its tentacles overreaching and overextending into every facet of society. Clearly, the government we have today is not the government outlined in the Constitution. Its grown far beyond the limits the Constitution setsand as a result we are facing dangers from which the Constitutions Framers tried to preserve us.

The Framers set out a path for us, and weve strayed from it. And the first thing any rational man does when hes lost his way is to look at a map. If you think, as I do, that America has taken a wrong turn, studying Americas history is the first step to helping us find our way back.

Americas second major problem is debt.

On January 1, 1791, during George Washingtons second year as president, the national debt was about 75 million dollars. Even at 9 trillion, that means to eliminate the national debt would require every American to pay roughly $30,000 each. Of course, thats not going to happen, especially since the average American has almost the same income-debt ratio as the federal government.