Once upon a time the world, our enemies in particular, feared American power whilst our friends and allies revered it.
It was bad to be an enemy of America.
It was good to be a friend of America.
After the Normandy landing in World War II, it took America and her allies ten months to bring the German war machine of Adolf Hitler to an end and to accept their unconditional surrender. Ten months from the landing until victory.
I am tired of hearing all the criticism of America. Not suggesting some of it isn’t well-deserved, but just tired of hearing it without any offsetting praise.
So, today I rise to defend and praise the Statue of Liberty Lady and our great country. We are the best hope for mankind though we may have a bit of maintenance to undertake.
This is Lady Liberty’s actual head while they were constructing the base and her body.
God bless America. Today, we celebrate American audacity — the willingness to take bold risks in the face of fatal outcomes. It is a characteristic of a man not all men possess.
More than 245 years ago, a handful of American men decided they had had enough preditations from an English king who possessed the largest and most powerful army and navy in the world to enforce his edicts against his subjects.
After careful deliberations, these audacious men declared independence from their king deciding that their rights were “unalienable” and were granted by God and that the power of governments should be derived from those who consented to be governed — not from kings.
America finds itself in the hold of several substantial challenges — the Imperfect Storm.
Chief amongst them are the following:
1. The Pandemic
2. The economic impact of the Pandemic
3. The civil unrest in our cities
4. The #DefundPolice v Black Lives Matter confrontation
5. Government response to diminished tax revenues
6. The Election
I call this witch’s brew of challenges the Imperfect Storm. It will test us, but we will pass the test. There may be extra innings.
In my now post-COVID bliss, with my newly cleared mind, with my returning brain cells, I make bold to say that we are really getting stupid at a time that we need to be smart.
What pops to mind is our inability to hold competing thoughts inside our single brain.
We once debated the merits of Miller Lite thusly:
“Less filling.”
“Tastes great.”
The critical thinker of the time would whisper to his beloved, “Maybe it’s both?”
The beloved would respond, “Of course it is, you moron.”
Then, we would say to ourselves, “Well of course. It can be two ideas at the same time, those ideas are not really in conflict, they are not mutually exclusive, and my brain is large enough to hold both of them without exploding.”
Were we smarter in those simpler days?
I once asked a man who had been in the Army when Pearl Harbor happened what it felt like to be attacked and lose most of our fleet in the mud. I imagined it was harrowing. I imagined that America was scared to its core. I was wrong.
This man would fight in the war in Italy — through two hard winters — carrying an M1 until he was “asked” to run a battery of 105mm guns in support of his infantry regiment and was ultimately to receive a battlefield commission ending the war capturing a German railway construction battalion which he oversaw as POWs.
“So, how did that feel?” I asked him, meaning how did that feel the day of and after Pearl Harbor.
He looked at me with the wise look that men who have lived hard lives like him, who have put his ass on the line for our country, who have killed our enemies in close combat, who have shot it out in direct eyeball-to-eyeball fire with Kraut 88s across Italian valleys, and he said, “I knew we were going to put an ass whipping on those Japs like they never imagined.”
I was incredulous because I had read west coast newspapers of that time and they had the Japs landing in California any day now. The Japs took the Philippines and a bunch of other places. The Germans had already invaded Poland two years earlier. The Germans declared war against us and we had fewer than 200,000 men in the Army and they had 6,000,000 plus great tanks and those damn 88s.
I woke up this morning to a lovely Texas day. It is a good habit to get into — waking up every morning. I am on a run that I hope to continue for a long time. Wish me well.
In my first look about at things, I was struck with awe and gratitude that the particular zip code in which I woke was in the United States of America.
I am amongst 330,000,000 persons who have the distinction of calling themselves Americans. Today, I don’t care where you came from, how you got here, whether you did it legally or not — I am just overwhelmed with our collective good fortune. Yours and mine.
Which raised another question: How did I ever come to deserve this enormous blessing?
We Americans are a tough people. Hard to believe that when you see what a bunch of victims and cupcakes we see on the Internet, but at our core, we are resolute survivors.
I used to ask my father if he thought my generation could have fought and won World War II. He received a battlefield commission in Italy running a Cannon Company shooting it out daily with Kraut 88s while in his twenties.
He would get a solemn look on his face and say, “The sons of tigers are tigers.” I never really understood what he meant.
I recently read something sent from a pal and it hit home on the subject. It focused on who we were back in 1969, half a century ago. Most of y’all weren’t born then, but I was a cadet at Virginia Military Institute, the Vietnam War was raging, in the mess hall there were moments of silence for VMI men killed in that war, and the country was aflame with riots.
I like to tell people today, “You have no idea what a proper riot looks like, Ace. You should have seen the Vietnam War riots. Now, those were riots.”
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