Back in the 1990s, Coral Ridge Ministries used to broadcast anti-ACLU sermons by Dr. James Kennedy. When I was an atheist, I used to watch Dr. Kennedy on TV – swearing and shouting at the TV screen every Sunday morning

It isn’t always fun being a conservative activist. There are some days I want to throw in the towel and find an easier job – like selling flannel shirts at Indigo Girls concerts or booking campus speeches for Noam Chomsky. Just a few weeks ago, I had one of those days.

It all started when I took a long road trip to try and resolve a First Amendment issue with a university attorney. That was a big mistake. I not only failed to resolve the issue but had to sit and endure personal insults from someone bent on defending the indefensible, simply because he knows the burden of losing the case will be shouldered by the taxpayers. University officials are like that. They do stupid things because they are shielded from the consequences of their stupidity.

To make matters worse, I started itching unbearably during my “discussion” with the statist employee – Oops! I meant the “state” employee. I wasn’t sure what that was all about until I got home and changed clothes – only to discover I was covered with rashes. I had gotten into poison ivy again. Just another reason I should have joined the Boy Scouts instead of picking up that third sport in grammar school.

So, instead of going to bed at a decent hour, I was headed to the Medac to beg for a steroid shot. Steroids have never made me huge. In my experience, they’ve only made me into an insomniac. I knew it was going to be a sleepless, itchy night. I was completely miserable and dejected about the future of our constitutional republic, too. That’s a pretty bad combination. So I decided to take some advice I had given my readers a few years before. Living in accordance with your own teachings is a good way to avoid being called a hypocrite by liberals who can’t be hypocrites because they don’t believe in anything.

The advice I followed was simply to make a list of things for which I should be grateful. Actually, my advice required making a list of 26 things for which I should be grateful – one for each letter of the alphabet. I got started on “A” because that’s the first letter in the alphabet. I only know that because I went to public school in Texas. My list looked something like this:

A: I thank God I was born in America where I have the right to criticize public officials who can only insult me because they can’t send me to summer camp in Siberia during the middle of the winter.

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Mike Adams was born in Columbus, Mississippi and attended high school and Community College in Texas. He holds a PhD in Sociology/Criminology from Mississippi State University. He is an Associate Professor in Criminal Justice at UNC-Wilmington.. He is a member of Christ the King PCA in Wilmington, NC