The American Thinker has this on our future, happening now in Greece:

The chaos outside parliament showed how tough it will be to implement the measures. A Reuters photographer saw buildings in Athens engulfed in flames and huge plumes of smoke rose in the night sky.

“We are facing destruction. Our country, our home, has become ripe for burning, the centre of Athens is in flames. We cannot allow populism to burn our country down,” conservative lawmaker Costis Hatzidakis told parliament.

The air in Syntagma Square outside parliament was thick with tear gas as riot police fought running battles with youths who smashed marble balustrades and hurled stones and petrol bombs. Terrified Greeks and tourists fled the rock-strewn streets and the clouds of stinging gas, cramming into hotel lobbies for shelter as lines of riot police.

First thing that ran through my head was what Glenn Beck has said a thousand times about fear – that people don’t panic when they are prepared, they panic when they are not prepared, so what does it hurt to stock up on a few things, tuck some cash and hard assets away, etc.

Imagine how different it could have been had they organized locally with their neighbors and said, okay, who can fix a car, who can grow things, who can fish, who knows how to post a website for all of us to stay in touch and organized, who can do this, who can do that, let’s get our heads together and figure out some sort of co-op arrangement with kids, and skills, and chores, so we can be self-sustaining until the bureaucrats straighten this mess out and our businesses open again and everything is running normally again… albeit without all the freebies we’re used to…

I surprised even myself that this was the first thing I though of, as I haven’t watched his show in months. I listen to him on the radio nearly every day, but I haven’t fired up the Roku in a dog’s age. I written before that I can’t devote 2 hours to him every night. When he was on Fox, I could rely on the structure of the show, constrained as it was by the network clock. His first 20 minutes were mandatory viewing, with the following 40 optional. But on GBTV the lack of a clock has loosened his messaging discipline and I’m just not willing to devote that much of my life to it. He’s such a blabbermouth he pretty well fills you in on the radio with everything he does on T.V. anyway, so it just seems a more productive use of my time.

In any case, the first thing that ran through my mind was how what we were seeing in Greece was driven almost entirely by the fact that they are several generations deep into government dependency. “Bootstrap” independence has been socialized out of them. Who is the Greek Glenn Beck? I dare say they do not have one. Had they had just one big voice, somewhere, saying, “Hey – Wake up. Rememeber who you are. Remember your proud heritage.”

I am so grateful to Glenn for that message. I’ve always been a patriot, but it was good to have some reminding as to why, and inspiration to buttress that feeling with reading, and re-reading, with the eyes and soul of a 46 year old woman, not a child on the 4th of July, which is so full of memories for me, and sort of the “book cover” of my soul’s keep of love for the ground beneath.