Don’t Settle, or Old Bats Beware

The other day, a friend told me a story. They have two cats, and one is a mouser; the other used to be. The two cats play, one increasingly settles. Like people, cats can grow older, tired, and settle.

Life encourages us to settle, urges us to let things slip a bit, then a bit more, our physical, emotional, and spiritual health, our long-term dreams and hopes, in favor of easier returns, socially approved reference points, dreamlessness, suppressed regrets, shortcuts to wealth. Don’t settle.

The media, and modern politics, are among the most insidious, consistently distracting, and ultimately corrosive influences we face – all of us. Running for Governor of Maine – something I never thought I would do – I see the fear, worry, exhaustion, and “settling” in people’s eyes, in their stories.

They are barely making ends meet, worried for their kids, wondering at times where the dreams – the idea of daily freedoms enjoyed, stable standards, healthy kids with healthy futures, have all gone.

They wonder if they have, themselves, the energy to confront endless government intrusions in their life, bureaucracy attached to everything, owning property, building something, getting a good job, renting a house (never mind buying one), securing promised veteran’s benefits, just living.

They wonder if they have the reach left, and whether they are alone. That is a big one, right there. They wonder if they must settle, do without, take the hits, accept the unfair, throw hands up in air, just bend to the coercive, uncaring will of faithless government that sees them as data, not a person.

I see it everywhere, hear it in dooryards and shops, in the side conversations at parades and sunset conversations, on old porches, around firepits, a kind of beleaguered resistance to the heavy hand. People want to believe they can assert their rights, often try to, but just get overwhelmed. 

But here is what else I see, and hear, with increasing regularity. People are sick of it all; they are beyond sick of being lied to, told that things they know are untrue somehow are true, that they must accept it all, and settle.

They are sick of being told they are wrong to be people of faith, wrong to think our Bill of Rights – every word – is still real and true, that they must change their moral fiber to fit the government viper.

They are beginning to step up, stand up, recognize that they are right, the gutless wonders who run the all-powerful bureaucracies they wrestle every day, that reach into their lives, can be removed.

I see also glimpses of hope, people starting to realize they may have the power to reverse all this mayhem, untruth, and damage. The Great and Mighty Oz is a fraud; the curtain can be pulled back.

There is a growing sense of the possible, a rumble in the rails. That rumble began in November 2024 and continues, even in troubled places like Maine, to build. People are tired of settling, ready to rise.

There is a new understanding that the Big Democrat Lies, the bold, overreaching arm of neo-Marxist ideas, can be rejected, thrown out, reversed, that the misinterpretation of laws, overspending, overtaxing, turning education into indoctrination, can be stopped – that it must be.

There is a growing awareness – which has only just begun – that we have been taken for fools, taught to believe we are powerless, that we are wrong, that the government, often seeking to replace God with its edicts and mandates, is not so right, powerful, or entitled to oppress after all.

People are beginning to want better, insist on better, not management of problems with more problems, not feeding addictions with half-truths, lack of affordability with shifted blame, not more entitlement, dependence, and empty justifications, but truth, integrity, and authenticity in leaders.

That is why Trump was elected, pulled all those new demographics, swing states and voters. People are tired of settling. He is authentic, clearly wants less government, and so do most Americans.

We want to reclaim our rights, and our kids’ futures, not settle for their trampling. We want less regulation, less debt, less overreach, more limits on government, more teaching in schools, not creating little activists, the way the Soviet education system did; we want kids to have independent minds, be curious, questioning, encouraged to be individuals, as we were, not the reverse.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).