Are there are any other issues confronting our fractious republic that matter if Americans themselves are too scared to walk outside, lest they be mugged by a “bail reform”-freed perp or shot by a gangbanger in a drive-by shooting? As we get ready to close the chapter on this bloody year of 2021, that is the question all policymakers and all public-minded citizens ought to be asking themselves.

A massive crowd swarmed City Hall Park and the streets around it on the afternoon of Oct. 28, 1922.

We often say we ought to do something ... we should help out, make a difference, and then, well we get busy. Let me tell you about a family that made a difference and significant impact on my life almost 42 years ago.

On the evening of Sunday, Dec. 12, a couple from South Dakota, escaping the first snowstorm of the season, was driving through Lampasas headed to their bucket list destination of Luckenbach. They spotted the elaborate Christmas decorations and strolled through the park.

As Congress worked in recent days to increase the legal limit on the federal debt, the Treasury kept that debt artificially frozen at approximately $28.9 trillion, where it stood at the beginning of last week.

Anyone who thinks about the current civil war in America comes to realize that it is, in large measure, a war between the religious and the anti-religious. The Left has contempt for evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics and Orthodox Jews for good reason: They represent everything the Left loathes.

In Texas, our new Congressman August Pfluger will tell you he supports your Second Amendment rights, but in Washington he votes against them. When the National Defense Authorization Act passed, Nancy Pelosi inserted a Section 529 that provides for the confiscation of firearms from activeduty servicemen without due process.

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, “The Road to Somewhere,” and the party’s bi-coastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

EDitor’s note: The proposal to draft women into mandated military service is an issue the Dispatch Record has followed and spoken against. We trust readers will be encouraged by this follow-up commentary from Tony Perkins.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation honored Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California three years ago with what it calls its “Emperor Has No Clothes Award,” named after the story by Hans Christian Andersen.