Happy birthday, America!
Today, we celebrate 249 years as an independent nation, but the events of the past few years had many of us worrying whether we would have many more to celebrate.
Photo credit: UPI
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This week is Fourth of July week, when many Americans, including the Huckabee Post staffers, are taking a break. Don’t worry, we’ve prepared plenty of material in advance for you. And as always, if anything major happens in the news, we’ll drop our corn dogs and rush back to our keyboards to report it (fortunately, World War III breaking out suddenly seems a lot less likely.)
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There is no Prayer Tree today.
Daily Bible Verse
“And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”
Joel 2:13
Happy birthday, America!
Today, we celebrate 249 years as an independent nation, but the events of the past few years had many of us worrying whether we would have many more to celebrate. But now, there’s a feeling that America is back, we’re strong, and our best days really are in front of us. Just as with the border, all it took was a new President who put America first.
We started as a unique country based on the notion that our rights come from God, not government; that because we recognize God as creator of us all, we are all equal in intrinsic worth and value; that we would not require a big government because we would mostly self-govern and live with the understanding that the great freedoms we enjoy require great responsibilities. As the scripture teaches, “unto whom much is given, much is required.”
(Maybe if kids today aren’t taught the Bible or American history, they’ll at least know that lesson from Spiderman.)
We were never perfect and still aren’t. Remember, our founding document said the goal was to “form a more perfect union;” that is, we are always to keep working to improve it.. We’ve had some very ugly chapters in our history, but the brilliance of our Founders was to create a nation who would be governed by law and not by our passions and emotions. We would grant rights even to those accused of awful crimes, so that we wouldn’t be ruled by a mob, whose sense of justice would be at best uneven, and at worst, as evil as the crime it was seeking to avenge. It made our system at times slow, sometimes unfair, and just plain wrong on occasion. But the ideal was to make all of us accountable to the same laws and suffer the same consequences for violating them.
All of that is at risk of going away if we allow people in the highest levels of law enforcement and the intelligence community get away with trying to stage a coup d’etat against an elected President. Or if we let some people break windows, assault innocent people and law enforcement officers, loot stores, and burn businesses, just because someone in power agrees with their political views. When that happens, we are rewarding anarchy and mob rule.
But while the news reports the worst of our nation’s sins, there are truly outstanding acts of love, kindness, and sacrifice that are happening around us every day. We need to hear more of their stories, and that’s why we try to share them with you in this newsletter.
We hope you’ll celebrate America today, proudly, loudly and unashamedly. Okay, we aren’t perfect, but name a better one. Even the anti-ICE protesters who are waving foreign flags on US soil are protesting because they don’t want to be sent back to the countries whose flags they’ve waving; they want to stay here. We don’t think they’ve thought this through. But we’re not supposed to question them because they’re acting on “their truth,” rather than “the truth.”
Two-hundred-forty-nine years ago today, some very courageous souls risked their fortunes and their very lives to give us a country unlike any ever created. We can’t allow ourselves to lose this country because of some who would trade liberty for the lunacy of a system that resembles government in the time of the Judges of the Old Testament, where “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
Let’s celebrate America. But let’s keep fighting to preserve the best of it, and working together to change and reform the worst of it.
The Midnight Ride of Sybil Ludington
It’s astounding the way the left has been so successful at using the phrase “hate speech” and the fear of school shootings to convince young people to demand that their own First and Second Amendment rights be taken away.
Somehow, they have managed to bamboozle a large slice of the young generation into simultaneously believing that they are wise and mature enough to start voting and even writing laws at 16; yet they are so childish and irresponsible, they can’t be trusted to touch a firearm until they’re 21, or to hear an opposing opinion without rushing to a safe space to cuddle a puppy and schmoosh Play-Doh.
When young people don’t know their rights, where those rights came from, and how much was sacrificed to secure them, it’s easy to convince them to trade them away for empty promises of comfort and security. This is the basis of all those quotes warning not to sell your birthright for a mess of pottage, a bit of advice so ancient and universal that it dates back to Esau in Genesis 25: 29-34. But leftists are still counting on young people not knowing it (no wonder they want to ban the Bible from schools.)
These days, students are taught an ugly, twisted and totally negative perversion of American history. They’re taught to hate their own magnificent heritage, and they don’t learn the most basic facts (or even what the word “pottage” means), let alone all the great stories you discover when you dig into real American history. This seems like the perfect week for a lesson in how America came to be born. And we’ll try to put it into terms they can relate to.
Maybe – possibly – today’s students vaguely recognize the name Paul Revere (although they might believe he was a slave trader. We doubt they had to memorize the poem, the way we did.) But how many know there was another heroic midnight rider who warned that the British were coming, only this one was a teenage girl from Duchess County, New York?
She’s just one of many American heroes that kids don’t learn about because modern textbooks scrub history of everything interesting or inspiring in favor of leftist social and political agendas that downgrade America. They depict this as a land of nothing but racism and oppression, not as a land where people of good will have struggled and sacrificed for generations, constantly working to improve things by establishing justice, securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity and creating a “more perfect union” (note that in the original foundational document, the writers made it clear that nothing’s perfect, but we would strive always to keep working together toward perfection.)
Kids, American history is not a list of personal grievances against people who’ve been dead for 200 years. It’s everything that ever happened to everyone before you came on the scene. Seek it out. It can be pretty interesting, and you can actually learn things from it!
For instance: listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of…Sybil Ludington? Movies these days are filled with unrealistic fictional depictions of "girl power," but Sybil was the real article. As the oldest of 11 children, she had to take on a lot of responsibility at a young age. She was barely 16 on the night of April 26, 1777. She had just tucked all her siblings into bed when, suddenly, there came an urgent knock at the door. It was a messenger, coming to warn her father, Col. Henry Ludington, that British troops were invading.
His troops weren’t expecting an attack and were scattered all over the countryside. Gathering them meant a dangerous ride over pitch black roads, through enemy soldiers, wild animals and hostile Indians (sorry: “Indigenous Peoples.”) Understandably, the messenger refused an order to go. But Sybil volunteered. Her father protested, but she pointed out that only she knew where all his men lived. As any father of a strong-willed daughter will recognize, he’d long since learned that arguing with her was futile. So Sybil mounted up and rode off.
It was a rainy night. The British had already set nearby Danbury, Connecticut, on fire, and the flames cast an eerie, red glow on the fog. It spurred Sybil on as she galloped from house to house, banging on doors and shouting that the British were coming. According to legend, at one point, a highway robber tried to intercept Sybil, but she raised her father’s musket and sent him running. Yet another reason why teenagers should think twice before demanding that the Second Amendment be taken away from them.
By dawn, Sybil and her horse were cold, wet and exhausted. She’d roused over 400 troops, who joined the Battle of Ridgefield and helped drive the British all the way back to Long Island Sound. Gen. Washington personally honored Sybil for her heroism.
Today, there are historic markers all along her route, and statues of her in New York and Washington (if they haven’t been torn down by historical illiterates.) But we bet most young people never even heard of Sybil Ludington, a teenager much like them, except she knew what really happened during the American Revolution. Maybe it’s because nobody wrote a famous poem about her midnight ride -- even though her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s. Let’s hope someone turns her story into a hip-hop musical so they’ll finally learn about it.
(Since originally writing this, we decided we should mention that some revisionist historians have labored mightily to try to debunk this story, but the best they’ve come up with is to claim they can’t find documentation of her ride. Too bad Sybil didn’t record it on her iPhone. In a comment that says more about contemporary “historians” than it does about actual American history, one wrote, “Sybil's ride embraces the mythical meanings and values expressed in the country's founding. As an individual, she represents Americans' persistent need to find and create heroes who embody prevalent attitudes and beliefs.” We’d say that when you start out with the attitude that our nation’s Founders’ values were “mythical,” it tends to give you a persistent need to tear down American heroes. But that’s not actually history, now, is it?)
The True Story of Yankee Doodle
Usually around the Fourth of July, we hear a lot of songs about all the great things about America: “God Bless America,” “God Bless The USA,” “America the Beautiful” (although you might not hear them in some places because of some people whining that hearing God’s name or praise for America “triggers” them.) But before them all, even before “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was the original American patriotic anthem, “Yankee Doodle.” However, it didn’t start out as a celebration of Americans, but as a mockery of them.
Since 1776, the song “Yankee Doodle” has been as much a symbol of America as the flag. Every child learns it from the cradle (or used to.) But many of us grew up without ever knowing what it really means. Like, why did he call his cap macaroni? Did he use cheese for hair mousse? (We bet a lot of recent college graduates actually believe that and think he was a speciesist exploiter of dairy cows.) Well, let’s answer those questions and more.
“Yankee Doodle” dates back long before 1776. It most likely started as a German nursery rhyme, since “dudel” is an Old German word for “fool.” It first became associated with America when British soldiers made up their own lyrics to it to mock the ragtag American Revolutionaries.
That baffling line – “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” – makes sense when you know that a macaroni wig was one of those ridiculously large powdered wigs that dandies of the time wore. The Brits were ridiculing Americans as a bunch of hayseeds, so dumb they’d think sticking a feather in their hat would make them look sophisticated. Imagine a Huffington Post article about Trump voters from Alabama, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of just how much arrogant condescension they intended to convey.
Unfortunately for the British, it turned out wars weren’t settled according to who had the spiffiest uniforms (in fact, red coats just made you an easier target.) Those unfashionable Americans were fighting for their homes, their families and their freedom. So they did what Americans have done ever since: they took the ridicule aimed at them, threw it back in the faces of those who mocked them, and got the last laugh. “Yankee Doodle” was the Babylon Bee of its time.
The Americans took the song that was meant to belittle them and adopted it as their anthem. They marched to it in the streets, sang it in bars, and made up their own new lyrics to promote the cause of freedom and glorify leaders like General Washington, “upon his strapping stallion.”
It wasn’t long before the British learned to dread the sound of that tune, especially when it was played on a fife and drum, accompanied by American militiamen. A Boston newspaper reported that Minutemen who captured two British officers forced them to dance to “Yankee Doodle” until they collapsed. After that, the Brits admitted that that mocking little song didn’t sound so funny to them anymore.
Well, now you know how “Yankee Doodle” came to be the unofficial American battle anthem that later inspired another great patriotic song for this time of year, George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” As Cohan proudly sang, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a Yankee Doodle, do or die…A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, Born on the Fourth of July!”
Of course, Cohan was actually born on the third of July. But that’s another story for another day.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY.......THE BEST IS YET TO COME.
We’d say that when you start out with the attitude that our nation’s Founders’ values were “mythical,” it tends to give you a persistent need to tear down American heroes. But that’s not actually history, now, is it?) I LOVE THIS REMARK IN YOUR STORY.