Wednesday.....Culture.....Secret (Service) Agent Man

He was retired from the Secret Service and as one of their agents protected President Reagan for four years. Joseph Petro's book Standing Next To History, An Agent's Life Inside The Secret Service had been well received in 2006. Typical of the integrity that you would expect from these men, the book wasn't going to give away any secrets or information that disparages the people that he protected. I was fortunate to see him speak last night to a gathering that would have to be considered liberal leaning. It was an evening of anecdotes with a little bit of history and didn't enter into political preferences. On the historical side, Special Agent Petro, and his KGB counterpart, were the only two observers, other than the interpreter, when President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, walked away from the Geneva delegations to a quaint cabana on Lake Geneva to personally take the measure of each other. On the personal side, Petro tells of how the first thing Ronald Reagan did every morning for eight years at the Oval Office was to reach into a desk drawer, grab some peanuts and scatter them on the patio for the squirrels. The very last thing he did in that office, upon visiting it one last time prior to the transfer to George H. W. Bush, was to reach in the drawer and scatter the peanuts again. This time he bent over and left a note card on the concrete along with the nuts that read Beware, the new guy has a dog!. So it was a lighthearted talk. The Q&A did bring up partisan politics and Mr. Petro's answer was predictable. He mentioned a tee-shirt that he once had that said you elect em...we protect em. He did make one comment that I would like to explore a little bit further here. He mentioned that the extreme rhetoric of this current political season could lead to violent acts but it is much more muddled and complicated than a simple statement like that. Where does the agenda of the Progressive Left come into the equation? When can subterfuge of Socialists in the administration be questioned? Is there any venting at all allowed as one extreme voting irregularity after another is reported? How far can our military and national defense be depleted, how many judges can legislate from their bench, how many czars will assume duties of the Congress, how many taxes-world taxes-hidden taxes be levied, how many social mores deconstructed through the intellectual bullying of political correctness, how many foreign policy decisions can be based on domestic political consequences, how many investigative whitewashes by the media, how many of these things should Americans watch without speaking about them to their fellow citizens? George W. Bush was called a murderer and everyday American citizens were labelled backwoods, superstitious believers in God yet this was acceptable. Mr. Petro was correct in that these are very dangerous and troubling times. The truth will win out if it can get out but an even greater weapon is prayer....prayer for humility in that we have all added to our national disability of not functioning as, not only a free people, but a God-fearing people that naturally discerns the evils of greed, the corruptions of power and the lure of thinking too highly of ourselves and our abilities apart from God's abiding grace.