Having
been born during the patriotic era of WWII, my July 4th's have always been a
source of an inner pride, of belonging to something larger than
mankind.
Growing
up in a small country town, where we all knew each other, there were bound to
be the occasional disagreements among individual, but on that day we were all
the same and in agreement, we were all proud Americans. We watched our
cowboy ranchers ride their horses, the farmers with their tractors and the
school-children as the all traversed the length of Main Street. We were a
community. In the years that followed, that idyllic period of my life, I
have witnessed a steady movement toward the reverse side of that patriotic
public sentiment. Sentiment driven by
the horrific results of the first “Atomic Bomb” resulted in a national guilt
rather than the understanding of the number of lives actually saved by that war
winning action.
As
our family members, who served our country, from the European WWII and from the
Pacific Japanese front, returned home, they were welcomed and given a chance to
prove their value as neighbors and friends.
Our educational system was in sync with our country’s attitude. We were taught about the country’s birth, the
men who fought for and achieved the rights the rest of our people have partaken
of in the decades that followed 1776.
Men like the rest of us, with warts and all, took our people out from
under the thumbs of any ruler and laid individual destiny into our own hands.
That
one document, celebrated on the fourth of July, brought individual freedom not
only to our country but set the example for other countries to establish their
own form of citizen governance.
Our
country has been under attack by friend and foe alike in the form of those who
would make us believe that our people were not as caring, nor as loving of our
fellow humans, as we should be.
Those
attitudes and beliefs that made us the United States of America have also made
us vulnerable. The result of that
vulnerability is what we have today. We
have finally reached the point of our society being splintered into so many
fragments re-unification will not be attained without attacking the propaganda emanating
from our educational and public media outlets.
Our
body politic has decided that power is more important than our nation’s people.
Political factions have decided that wining should be a game and that the rules
of honesty and truth are no longer part of serving our society. Our news reporting media seems to have been transformed
from a non biased factual reporting function to a propaganda outlet of
whichever political faction suits the owners are backing up. Our educational system shifted from teaching
our new members of the profession to push sociological change rather than the
traditional reading writing and arithmetic to the future of our country, our
children.
The
thankful part of this diatribe is that God is not dead, Christmas is still
Christmas, the majority of our people still love and appreciate our neighbors,
regardless of race, color, or creed.
Contrary to, what some would have us believe, the facts prove that the majority of the world’s
population look to our country for our leadership, our innovations, our charity
and our basic societal belief…
WE
WERE ALL CREATED WITH THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE OUR DIRECTIONS IN LIFE, THE RIGHT TO
STRIVE FOR AND ACHIEVE OUR HIGHEST GOOD…
GOD BLESSED AMERICA, AND WE CONTINUE TO MOVE TOWARD PERFECTION.
