Today, in the United States of America, on Memorial Day, we honor and remember all the brave men and women who died while fighting to keep us free. God bless them all.
What would the brave men and women who fought and died in all the past wars think of America today? Would they recognize the country for which they fought? Would they be proud of the country it has become?
World War I and WW II gave us heroes like Alvin York, Audie Murphy and Desmond T. Doss. Both York and Doss were actually conscientious objectors. They abhorred the thought of killing. They both served their country nonetheless.
York ended up killing some 25 enemy soldiers to save the lives of the handful of men in his command. Then he single-handedly captured 132 of the enemy. Doss served as a medic and never carried a weapon. He saved the lives of 75 men during the battle of Okinawa. Murphy managed to enlist in the Army even though he was under age. He became one of the most decorated soldiers of WW II. All three men were awarded the Medal of Honor for their heroism.
While all three men survived the war they fought in, today we also honor these men, and every other man and woman who has served, along with the fallen heroes.
Neither York, Doss, nor Murphy was very well off financially. In fact York and Murphy were dirt poor. York barely eked out a living as a farmer. Murphy had to quit school after the fifth grade to support his siblings because his parents had both died. So he picked cotton and took any job that came his way.
Today
Today, however, many progressive Americans say that our country’s government needs to take care of the poor. But this is not a function of government.
We are all individually responsible for ourselves, but it is also our individual responsibility – yours and mine – to help the less fortunate among us. Trying to abrogate this responsibility to an unfeeling bureaucracy is not in keeping with Christ’s teachings.
Progressive Americans also say we should celebrate intrinsically disordered behavior and that two men or two women should be able to get ‘married.’ And they say that people who are all mixed up about what sex they are should be able to use whatever bathroom they want to use. They should also be able to mutilate their bodies in a completely impossible attempt to change their sex.
But the progressives don’t stop there. They say abortion is an essential service and that it is “life sustaining” even though it clearly ends human lives. And, as we learned very recently, in their opinion Sunday Mass is not life sustaining. It is non-essential, even though God Himself has told us to keep the Lord’s Day holy. York and Doss would most certainly disagree with such thinking.
And even though the progressives say lock downs during the pandemic are essential to save lives, they have no problem killing off elderly people in nursing homes by needlessly exposing them to the coronavirus.
Progressive Americans have been pushing both secular and socialistic ideas for many years now. Religion has no place in government they say. But now they are even trying to re-write history and force a false notion of America’s founding down our children’s throats.
Trying to Change History
If you haven’t yet heard The 1619 Project is now in 4,500 classrooms in the U.S. This ludicrous narrative claims America was founded in August 1619, when the first slaves were brought to Jamestown. Of course, every historian of repute says America was founded on July 4, 1776. In a nutshell the 1619 Project attempts to argue that the Founding Fathers real purpose in breaking free of England was to preserve slavery in the colonies and the main reason for the Revolutionary War was to keep slavery in America. This is “wokeness” gone nuts.
If this is the kind of garbage our kids are being taught in public schools now, every parent ought to pull their kids out of public schools and put them in a faith based school or home school them. But of course the progressives are already working on trying to outlaw home schooling. How dare stupid parents try to teach their kids Christian morality and values or try to teach them real facts and objective truths.
Progress and Regress
We’ve come a long way, in many respects, over the last 100 years. Unfortunately, in many ways our culture has also slowly been regressing.
York, Murphy, Doss and all the other men and women who fought for our country fought for “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But we are becoming the land of the stupid and, as Peter Darcy said recently, the home of the frightened.
If we really want to honor all the men and women who fought to keep our country free, we would do well to keep in mind the words of our first president.
“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” — George Washington (Farewell Address, 1796).
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