Adrian Murray is a successful businessman, a credentialed tea party activist, a Constitution advocate, and conservative speaker.
Bravo to Murray for his timely and encouraging book.
“Common Ground America” starts with the Founder’s challenges and thoughts during the Articles of Confederation period and progresses through the creation of that grand and precedent-setting document, the U.S. Constitution… a blueprint for a new country.
This is the beginning.
Adrian Murray works through the post-Constitutional period and highlights the past, current and future challenges for America and its citizens. He explores the conflicts between our Founders and their seeming hypocrisies. Murray reveres the Founders, but puts them onto a more realistic pedestal with warts, flaws and all. He respects their ultimate worth for starting something really big and something never before formulated. In terms of values, he also credits America’s virtues of compassion, justice and faith as contributing factors to America’s success. With this powerful history, he challenges current Americans and elected officials to do better in honoring these virtues.
“Common Ground America” is a scholarly book with poignant stories.
The author introduces his concept of American myths and dispenses with each one.
Throughout the book, Murray weaves some pertinent quotes made during key American crises. The inspiring statements by Frederick Douglass, the Founders and de Tocqueville add real substance to Murray’s work. The book is well thought out, well organized and well written. It offers not just a litany of complaints but a specific, but brief, script for future American success. One plea is to end the “dialogue of division”.
His “Common Ground” solution is not the distasteful “compromise” abhorred by the far-left and right. For him, “it will not mean giving up the sovereignty of our beliefs or the sanctity of our ideas.” But it will seek those areas of agreement on which we can all focus.
He decries the intrusion of the federal government on personal liberties and says that “the welfare state as it exists today amounts to nothing more than compassionate slavery”. Also, “at the rate the government is moving with its ‘war on poverty’ we’ll all be starving to death in another forty years.”
Murray is hopeful that America can get it together before then to have a bright future, only if its citizens get active, get involved, and drop the stereotypes and labels.
This book represents the kick-off for Adrian Murray’s nationwide community-based organization, Common Ground America, which has a heroic goal of involving citizens in all the 7,000 plus political districts in the U.S. This grassroot organization has great promise and should help America find its “common ground” for our future.
The choice is ours.
Adrian Murray’s book is a worthwhile adventure and as a tea party activist myself, I appreciated his candor and encouragement and his avoidance the stale rhetoric of the extreme vantage points. He challenges us to re-think the “why” the “what”, the “who” and the “how” of our next decades.
I recommend this refreshing new book very highly.
Order Common Ground America
Barry A. Schlech, Ph.D.
Burleson, Texas
