-By Warner Todd Huston
America is a singularly different nation where it concerns our military veterans. We love them. We even have a national holiday to honor them. This is not so in most of the rest of the world. Elsewhere military veterans are not so loved as they are here.
Is that because the United States is the Sparta of the world, loving war more than anything else? Hardly. In fact its because our soldiers bring peace wherever they go, not perpetual war.
In other countries, soldiers are usually the dregs of society, living off the people while at the same time lording over them with machine guns and violence.
In other countries the military is feared by both the people and the government because all too often the army is used to take power and steal away the government for its own aggrandizement. There is no accident that the word “coup” is one rarely spoken in the USA unless when viewing foreign news.
So, not in America. In the USA we respect our soldiers because they respect us as much as they respect the law.
When an American sees a soldier an American will feel pride, not fear. When an American hears that a fellow is a veteran, an American thanks that fellow for his service.
In other countries when people see soldiers they fear them, they loathe them. In other countries they don’t want to sit near soldiers on public transportation, they avoid eye contact. Here we shake their hand and ask if they need anything.
So, from us to you, our dear military veterans, we thank you. We thank you for putting your lives on hold while serving us, while making sure we are safe and able to go about our business unafraid of danger, and for putting your own safety at risk.
Happy Veterans Day to you all.
Continue reading “
Veterans Day, 2017: This is Why Americans Love OUR Veterans”
This Independence Day holiday is an excellent time to revisit one of Red Skelton’s most endearing works: his recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and what that pledge means.
Today America enjoys the celebration of 241 years as a nation by noting the day we declared our independence from England. Sadly, that celebration has, for too many, become the “Fourth of July” holiday, a day of picnics, rote parades, “white sales,” and for some a day off work. Of course, we should not and don’t celebrate any “July Fourth” holiday. We celebrate Independence Day, the day we formally separated from our parent nation and took those first unsteady steps into the world as a nation of our own.
A few years after the Civil War as the nation started upon its long road toward reconciliation, rebuilding, and healing the wife of one of the war’s union generals noticed the touching devotion of Confederate widows, wives and their children as each year they came together to place flowers and little flags at the graves of their fallen. Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan was so moved by the devotion she witnessed that she urged her husband, Illinois General John A. “Blackjack” Logan, to look into creating what was to become Memorial Day.
HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
The year 2016 is now in the rear view mirror and Baby New Year has waddled in, diaper and all. But baby, you are still young and naive and I hate to say it but you and the generation you are ushering in will have an awful time once you find out what liberals have in store for you.
Kwanzaa, the purported “African” holiday celebrated only in the United States, is the ultimate politically correct holiday. It is little observed, even by our own African American community, of course, but those that do celebrate it are wholly unaware that this faux holiday was created in 1965 by a man with a very troubled past. For Kwanzaa’s creator, Maulana Karenga, has a violent, racist criminal record, and is even a rapist who was convicted of torturing his victims.
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor — and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
During the Civil War, both presidents, Lincoln and Jeff Davis, issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations and celebration of the holiday as we know it grew as a result.
As no truth is more clearly taught in the Volume of Inspiration, nor any more fully demonstrated by the experience of all ages, than that a deep sense and a due acknowledgment of the governing providence of a Supreme Being and of the accountableness of men to Him as the searcher of hearts and righteous distributer of rewards and punishments are conducive equally to the happiness and rectitude of individuals and to the well-being of communities; as it is also most reasonable in itself that men who are made capable of social acts and relations, who owe their improvements to the social state, and who derive their enjoyments from it, should, as a society, make their acknowledgments of dependence and obligation to Him who hath endowed them with these capacities and elevated them in the scale of existence by these distinctions; as it is likewise a plain dictate of duty and a strong sentiment of nature that in circumstances of great urgency and seasons of imminent danger earnest and particular supplications should be made to Him who is able to defend or to destroy; as, moreover, the most precious interests of the people of the United States are still held in jeopardy by the hostile designs and insidious acts of a foreign nation, as well as by the dissemination among them of those principles, subversive of the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations, that have produced incalculable mischief and misery in other countries; and as, in fine, the observance of special seasons for public religious solemnities is happily calculated to avert the evils which we ought to deprecate and to excite to the performance of the duties which we ought to discharge by calling and fixing the attention of the people at large to the momentous truths already recited, by affording opportunity to teach and inculcate them by animating devotion and giving to it the character of a national act:
