Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works by Rick Santorum Read Free Book Online

are virtually guaranteed to produce unhappiness in individuals and families. That is why I took the position as CEO of EchoLight Studios, a faith and family movie production and distribution company. We need to fight back by producing and promoting high-quality films that present the good, the true, and the beautiful. And if we are going to give the average American a chance to succeed, we must win.
    We all have learned in our history classes the influence of popular culture. In the 1700s, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense pushed Americans toward revolution. Uncle Tom ’ s Cabin so stirred the conscience of the nation that it endured a civil war in order to extirpate slavery. From our earliest days, books and plays have helped define America. In words attributed to the seventeenth-century Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher, “If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” 8
    The cultural toxins are brewed not only in Hollywood but also on Madison Avenue, which is perverting the American Dream of a prosperous life into a materialist nightmare. The pitchmen inflame our appetites with a degraded vision of the good life, usually sold with sex.
    This American nightmare is a prescription for disillusionment, emptiness, and despair. The advertisers show you what you must have or must look like to be happy or beautiful. It’s a lie, and the lie leads to bankruptcy and anorexia. Show mea single and sexually inactive man or woman in a movie, and I show you an unhappy, ridiculed loser. Show me the opposite extreme in real life, and I’ll show you a lonely, vacuous predator or a willing victim who will likely struggle with meaningful romantic relationships, even within his or her marriage.
    This egocentric pursuit of pleasure, material wealth, sex without consequences, and fame is the new morality. It may provide temporary thrills and moments of satisfaction, but it will not lead to happiness. The little band of patriots who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in Philadelphia had something very different in mind when they declared that all men have a God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. They weren’t talking about the pleasure of a contented animal. Noah Webster’s first dictionary, published in 1828, defined happiness as “The agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good.” 9 “Good,” in turn, was defined as “having moral qualities best adapted to its design and use, or the qualities which God’s law requires; virtuous; pious; religious.” 10 Happiness means living in conformity with God’s intention for your life. We are endowed by our Creator with the other two “unalienable rights” of life and liberty so that we may pursue his will for our life—to be good.
    The root of the confused new morality is a grossly distorted understanding of freedom. We Americans like to talkabout freedom, but we rarely examine what we mean by the word. In recent decades, it has become popular, particularly among many libertarians, to think of freedom as being allowed to do as we please. But there are two aspects of freedom: freedom from (we’ve got that one down) and freedom for . In other words, the exercise of freedom must be oriented to choosing what is true and good, always keeping in mind our obligations to one another and the common good. Otherwise, freedom degenerates into license, which ignores others and pursues self-interest alone. So smoking marijuana, hiring prostitutes, aborting your child, ignoring the poor, and doing whatever else gives you momentary pleasure, as long as no one else gets hurt, are mistaken for freedom. This is how many young people—bamboozled by Madison Avenue, movies, and television—now define the American Dream. When freedom is thus distorted, the good itself is obscured. It is confused with choice, and choice, irrespective of what is chosen, reigns supreme.
    The cultural elites tell