Elevator Down (The Selling of a Nation)

By William Parker Archibald

Either a Clinton or a Bush has been in the White House for nearly half, or twenty years, of our precipitous decline. Both seek the office again. This book offers an alternative, a fresh approach to the same land Lincoln referred to when he passionately argued for "our last, best hope".

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Parker Archibald
• Release date: Jul 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310262081

Book preview

ELEVATOR DOWN

The Selling of a Nation

They Promised Us the Moon

Volume I

by

William Parker Archibald

~~~

Smashwords Edition

ELEVATOR DOWN

The Selling of a Nation

They Promised Us the Moon – Volume I

Copyright © 2015 by William Parker Archibald

All rights reserved

Textual Advisement: Elaine Bush

Technical Support: Digital Depot (Maurice Tift)

Editing: Kit Duncan

Book Layout: Nat Mara

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A writer should struggle with the words

so the reader won’t have to.

– the author

When I was a youngster,

My father’s favorite joke was about the farmer who had a pig with a wooden leg. When asked about it, the farmer went on for days about the virtues of the pig and how attached the family had become to it.

Acknowledging all of that, the visitor asked yet again why the animal had a wooden leg. To which the farmer responded, Well, if you had a pig like that, would you eat it all at once?

This, in a real way, is the story of America. I’m not questioning our love for it. That is well established. Rather, I’m questioning why, after centuries of toil and sacrifice, we’ve all of a sudden turned on it and are now devouring it with the reckless abandon of fools who sat down to feast on the goose that laid the golden egg.

Dedication

This book, indeed this whole endeavor to preserve, protect and defend that which has been given to us at such enormous cost, is dedicated to all of the patriots, both living and dead and to my good friend and mentor,

Millard Fuller,

founder of Habitat for Humanity International and the Fuller Center for Housing.

Table of Contents

Elevator Down

List of Headings

Elevator Down

1969 To

the Present

There’s no way that life should be this hard, not in this land, not in this time. At the end of the 1960’s, beginning of the 1970’s, this country was on top of the heap with no one remotely within striking distance. Oh sure, the Cold War was still raging, but we had touched down on the Moon just as communist Russia, crumbling under the weight of its own broken promises, was beginning its slow, downward spiral toward certain doom. Within two brief decades, once proud Soviet coal miners would be striking for something as basic as bar soap while people stood in endless lines for the few pieces of rotten produce on their grocers’ shelves.

Americans, on the other hand, had good jobs, career positions with solid benefits and pensions. One person on a blue collar wage could feed an entire family, put the kids through college, own their home outright and retire young enough to travel the country in an RV. There was pride, there was hope, there was every expectation that the future would be even rosier and life all the easier. Why wouldn’t it be? After all, they promised us the Moon.

Now look at us. If we haven’t lost our job or home, or had our savings and hope of retiring wiped out, we know someone in our family or down the street that has. Just this week, I found a person living in his car at an interstate highway rest area. Friends and I are now scrambling to get him on his feet. This situation was simply unimaginable but a brief time ago.

Two Seminal Events

Two seminal events occurred. The first took place on July 21, 1969, when, in my opinion, America reached the apex of its ascendance by trouncing the Russians through winning the space race. We were the first to make a manned