• Editor’s note: The Presidential quotes below were compiled by the author of “Anonymous: A Warning” and opened each of the chapters in the second half of the book.

• As 2019 comes to a close, I was reflecting on the 3 roundtrip trans-Atlantic crossings I took this year. One thing I heard consistently from people I engaged in France, England, Greece, Netherlands, Canada, and Romania, was what happened to and where was America’s leadership in facing the truth of facts and standing up for our principles and the commitment to our ideals.
• The understanding in this country on the agreement of underlying facts has became secondary to “alternative facts,” which in my view, has divided America unlike anytime since 1968. That was the year of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, when election year politics were fueling the caldron of summer riots with African-American urban centers set ablaze, and where every neighborhood knew of someone being shipped off to the Viet Nam War, knowing many of them would not return home. We were clearly a country tearing itself apart, highlighted by the violence at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, where Richard M. Nixon again became the party’s nominee. Fast-forward 51 years where one commentator recently referred to our country as now being in a cold civil war that could bubble-over and be worst than that seething year of 1968. I was then a mere 14 years of age beginning American civics studies and passionately interested in what was dividing our country.
• We leave 2019 a people more divided than ever, with Thanksgiving & Christmas dinner tables across this land being tested in the pure love of allowing divergent viewpoints among families and friends. Reportedly, some did not fare so well.
• The USA we all know and hold dear is going to be put to a test in 2020.
• May a new decade bring on the dawn of change with a sense of hope that we will emerge from the heap of ashes left behind from the burning away of the past and with leadership that unites us as a people, rather than dividing us.
• Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, wrote in his notes this exchange: Questioner: “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

   Benjamin Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

• 2020 will be the year that this question is answered.
• Can we keep our Republic?
• Or will our Republic gravitate into an Autocracy?
• Let the motto of the Commonwealth of Kentucky be our guide causing profound introspection as we enter the promise of a new decade: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”

Steve Klein, Yelm Community Blog host.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

John F. Kennedy

“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”

Ulysses S. Grant

“The President hears a hundred voices telling him that he is the greatest man in the world. He must listen carefully indeed to hear the one voice that tells him he is not.”

Harry S. Truman

“Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.”

Thomas Jefferson

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Abraham Lincoln