USA’s Memorial Quest For Truth, Justice

Progressive haters regress all of us when they refuse to concede USA is the FIRST NATION ON EARTH to be founded, if imperfectly, on EQUALITY & to expend a million lives & countless treasure on progressing relentlessly in achieving its original promise.

It was on that basic truism that WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan wrote her “Teach Your Children to Love America.” For her Memorial Day piece, she took inspiration from the NY schools’ 1900 ‘Manual of Patriotism,’ urged especially by Civil War veterans who wanted their offspring to know & remember the last full measure of devotion hundreds of thousands of Americans gave to save the Union & end slavery. In contrast, she noted, “We [now] live in an age … in which children are instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is & always was a dark & scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice. And we never meant it about the Declaration.”

That, of course, is a radical progressive lie. Says, Peggy, “Ideology & idiocy impose this view, shallowness too. It began some decades ago but has speeded up & became more extreme the past 10 years.” More realistically, she suggests, that NY Manual of Patriotism was not just about teaching our kids how to wave the flag, to admire the admirable qualities of our nation. It was also about “America at the turn of the 20th century [which] was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is & means to be, so they would love [and embrace] it too. And, truth is, today’s adults FROM WHEREVER badly need to know the grand truth of America’s centuries’ old battle like a Superman for “truth, justice & the American way.” Failing that, Peggy warns, “when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen.”

Davd Soul