Another Memorial Day: Is America still worth fighting for?
With another Memorial Day upon us, we may consider the question: Is America still worth fighting for?
On November 21, 1864, President Lincoln wrote to a Mrs. Bixby of Massachusetts, who had lost five sons in the Civil War.
He penned, “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
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But, alas, today’s military — like so many institutions in our country — is going “woke.” That is to say that they are being infected with a cultural Marxism that has re-written our history, making America out to be irredeemably evil.
One regular contributor to NPR said several months ago: “[T]he United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands. That is why slavery is not well taught in our schools.”
To this sentiment, conservative commentator and author Michael Medved responded: “Dr. Martin Luther King, by contrast, never dismissed his American heritage and identity. He summoned his nation to honor its highest ideals, rather than disparaging its claims to greatness and goodness. His example stressed American possibilities and promises, not guilt or accusations concerning its multiple shortcomings.”
But what the cultural Marxists propagate is that we’re just as racist a nation as we’ve ever been. There’s been no progress, supposedly. If you deny that, then you’re a racist, they say.
No doubt America has had many flaws. But the brilliance of this nation is the foundation the founders laid whereby we could correct these flaws.
America is a grand experiment, encapsulated by an idea which flies in the face of Marxism: self-rule under God. Remove either part, the “self-rule” or the “under God” (as our internal and external enemies would like to see happen) and we would no longer have America as founded.
As noted, wokeism is infesting today’s military. Even the U.S. Navy partnered with a drag queen influencer on social media to promote recruitment.
The offices of Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman Chip Roy have produced an eye-opening report called, “Woke Warfighters: How Political Ideology is Weakening America’s Military.”
They write, “Our military’s singular purpose is to ‘provide for the common defense’ of our nation. It cannot be turned into a left-wing social experiment. It cannot be used as a cudgel against America itself. And it cannot be paralyzed by fear of offending the sensibilities of Ivy League faculty lounges of progressive pundits.”
After all, they add, “The world is a dangerous place.”
Basically we’re raising up young people to hate their own country, warns Dr. William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, in his new book, The War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class Is Killing the American Dream. I got to speak with him on a radio segment recently.
In The War on Virtue, he writes, “If Americans become convinced that their country is fatally flawed, why will they defend it?”
I asked him to elaborate on this quote. First, he mentioned how the military is down 25% in reaching its recruitment goal.
Then he told me, “We’re teaching kids to hate America, not in every school but in too many of them. And they’re starting in kindergarten, going right through to graduate school. That’s what they teach — that America is a racist country that rips people off.”
Donohue elaborated, “If you teach people to hate their own country, the greatest country in the history of the world, then don’t be surprised when some young people — who’ve been indoctrinated, basically brainwashed, by these left wing college professors and in high school — don’t be surprised if they say, ‘Hey, why would I want to defend this country? After all, we’re not any better than anybody else?’ It’s almost a form of national suicide.”
Donohue said ordinary Americans need to push back, like what we saw in the recent response to Bud Light giving in to “transgender mania.”
“It’s a dangerous time,” said Dr. Peter Lillback, the founder of Providence Forum, for which I serve as executive director.
But he also told me, “There’s never a last word for a nation until God’s Providence says ‘You’re done.’ I’m not ready to give up on America, there’s too much treasure of great freedoms, of wisdom, of biblical truth, of even of sending the Gospel out to the nations. There’s always a chance for revival, reformation, new beginnings.”
Because the foundation is still there, America is even yet worth fighting for. But those foundations are being eroded, day by day. It would seem that we are faced with a choice of two options for our national future: revival or ruin.
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where Jerry also serves as senior producer and an on-air host. He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). www.djkm.org? @newcombejerry www.jerrynewcombe.com
