Introducing our Executive VP and Treasurer in her own words

by Former Governor Heather Hixon

After I left the Governors office in Oklahoma I looked forward to a life of retirement from the world of living a public life. So I am sitting at my kitchen table typing up my first blog post as I have returned to the the life I set aside. It was about the same time the Bush administration came into Washington and I went on the speaking circuit and enjoying a life outside of the like light. I feel like these years have aged myself, and aged my country. I worked in the State Department, USAID, and for the US at the UN and it isn't my place to attack folks who make choices above my pay grade. However in the current Administration a lot of good ideas in policy have been lost in bad application and implementation. I look at the loss of a lot of important ideas and the political climate of politicians and parties that has made doing what we have to for our own policy the hostage of the 24 hour news cycle. I was at a charity fund raiser and the Chairman of the Board for the Safe and Secure America Project was seated across the table from me. By the desert course I convinced him I was the candidate to direct the outreach for the next election and I convinced myself I should take this job.

My son got interested in the teachings of Rick Warren, on the role of purpose and dedication in life. I think about that sense of purpose and it is a fundamental tale in our American Culture. America was a poor nation who wanted to sell a small set of wares and a large set of agriculture products. A babe in the world of nations, we could have sought a protector or an alliance but the founders had a sense of purpose and a sense of Direction. An America that was a friend to all seeking to live our own way and trade with those who would be our friends. But like my son, we had to learn that purpose alone is not enough. Some times purpose without leadership leads to watching Rome Burn. In that very world John Quincy Adams, who as a young man wrote for President Washington the call to avoid entangling alliances, for President James Monroe drafted the Monroe Doctrine. We didn't have the might to enforce it, and the idea came first from the British government, but the men who were young when Washington liberated this country understood Purpose requires leadership and our young Brothers and Sisters in the Western Hemisphere should not stand under the sword and shield of the British Empire but should be defended by their older brother.

In China, a great and eternal empire stood on the brink of destruction. A revolution threatened to wipe out the people visiting China some of whom held a place of Imperial dominion over China. Our government joined in to defend its citizens, and we then enjoyed on those imperial powers that china should not be cut apart into new Colonial Nations and within the zones of influence all nations should be able to trade and enter to do business. Could we have fought a war to keep China free? Regrettably we could not but some of the freedom we fought for lead to Hong Kong and the rebirth of China as economic nation and perhaps some day a fully capitalist one.

I would like to say all exercise of American power has been as just as those. I could speak to the rebuilding of Germany and Japan among other positive exercises of power in American foreign policy but what is clear in our history is when America withdraws from the World or does not exercise power with Justness and purpose the world and the United States suffers. After the close of World War I short sighted United States Senators and members of the White House decided that we should disassemble our navy. They decided we should ratchet up tariffs and taxes and shut America off from the world. Adolph Hitler and the great depression came as a result. An age where people around the world questioned the values of freedom, liberty, and democracy. We entered in to World War I and World War II late, and after other peoples and other nations paid the price with lives and destruction. The lesson of History shows that America has a purpose, and when we shrug from that purpose the world suffers.
I can't blame those who fought in those Generational wars for the need of shrugging off the Armour of war and putting on the robe of peace, but the world is a place demanding an American leadership. And we can sympathize as we ourselves after the war with communism were offered up those same choices. We entered into a policy we viewed as more moral with our CIA and reduced our human intelligence. We reduced our services by a quarter or a third. We went to turn our swords into plowshares as the empire of the communist world fell by the wayside from the basement of their castle snakes of a new conflict rose out to bite at our ankles. In the smoke of our civil war a snake rose in Mexico where the French Empire put up a puppet king to rule over Mexico and the sides of our Civil war considered the prospect of uniting to free Mexico. In the Boxer Rebellion and in the Monroe doctrine our leadership looked forward but in the 1990s we saw a foreign policy that instead looked backward and did not look for the next threat to our security. Even as the first attack at the World Trade Center, the bombing of the Barracks in Saudi Arabia, to the destruction of our embassy we lacked a government with a vision and drive to put back the Armour that America has so justly wielded in the defense of humanity in this world. Even President Bush when he was elected did not call for the Armour to be slipped on once again. The Armour weak and rusted and loose but young men my sons age went to fight a war with the purpose and drive that has lead to American greatness over the many years. But these men my son's age are fighting without a leader putting the vision of foreign policy forward as the United States fights the third great generational war of American History. So with that in mind I am going to try to advocate for the Justness of America and the Justness of our ability to fight for the values we stand for.