Take back our country?

Recently, journalist Sam Donaldson said the thing that angered him most during the 2012 presidential campaign was the Tea Party adherents insistence that they wanted to "take back their country'. It is no longer your country, Donaldson insisted.

That caused mixed feelings of anger and frustration among many of us. But now, thanks to the insight of Arnold Ahlert, we realize that the correct feeling should be one of pity.

To understand, please take five minutes from your life to read Ahlert's column: "Too many Americans will never know what they missed."

The problem with Donaldson's point of view is that he just doesn't understand what we considered "our country". But, Ahlert sees Donaldson's position as widely shared, and pleads: "How do you explain to these people that America was once a nation with a largely intact and understandable sense of right and wrong? How do you tell them there was once a time when most men were real men, not oh-so-sensitive self-absorbed metrosexuals? How do you tell them most women were once strong enough to handle themselves, as opposed to being the angry/helpless creatures that feminism and/or sexual harassment laws turned them into?

Surprisingly, age is not at play here. Donaldson is scarcely five years younger than I. Nor is his life experience all that different from my own. He was raised in the Southwest, not in the liberal bastions on the East or West Coast. He did have a college education, which I did not. He was attracted to a career in radio broadcasting. He worked as a volunteer in Dwight Eisenhower's 1956 presidential campaign, and later enlisted in the U.S. Army. I fairly closely mirrored that path, though my Army experience was before Eisenhower's political career.

What happened? Did Donaldson become so steeped in the Washington scene that he missed what was happening? Or did he just forget?

Ahlert speaks of younger Americans who never knew and probably will never know the America we so loved. But Donaldson is as far removed from our understanding of what America should be as are any of the 'Occupy' crowd.

I feel sorry for Sam, and all those unwashed kids who camped out in city parks across the nation, demanding, who knows what?

But mostly, I feel sorrow for my own grandkids and great-grandkids who will likely be deprived of  the wondrous life we lived... when it was 'our country'.