Over the past weekend, tuned into Memorial Day events on the television, I was of course reminded of the horrible losses we have endured in all the wars we have fought.
The Vietnam War is the war I am most familiar with as it was in my era as a young woman. Remembering friends who went came back and friends who went and did not return.
Remembering the draft and the fear by some that their number would come up. Some went to college and others to Canada to avoid the war. Many stepped up and served.
The military of today is all volunteer. They choose to serve. These young people are true patriots.
It is easy to sit around and muse the country is going to hell in a hand basket and demean the younger generation for a lack of knowledge about their country and how freedom has been preserved by the loss of life of former generations, but one must look at why it is different.
In the Vietnam era we watched the war play out on the nightly news with war correspondents and we had great magazines that covered the war with photos of real suffering by real people. Remember the little girl running naked in the street covered in napalm?
On 911 the most searing memory I have is seeing people leap to certain death rather than be burned alive.
Then something happened. Somebody, somewhere decided what we should be viewing on media. Somebody decided it was too hard to handle watching a person leap to their death.
So now we have a generation of young people who have never seen the horrors of war other than seeing two buildings implode.
The media will show Christians being led to certain death with decapitation by ISIS and that’s as far as it goes and I suspect as far as it needs to go; but by sanitizing all atrocities it seems not to be reality.
The rising generation of young people have been protected to the point that when they go to a university they now have a safe place to go if a speaker they disagree with upsets them. We have cheated this generation out of a realistic view of life. It is the highest form of disrespect we can afford them.
It is easy to push to the background memories of war; but without the service of WWII vets we might very well be speaking German.
Political correctness is pushed on all of us, all of the time. Our rising generation of young adults have been force fed or indoctrinated into submission to the progressive left’s liberal social agenda.
Keep in mind to the rising generation there is no memory of Reagan, the last true conservative to serve in the Whitehouse. What they hear now is a barrage of what is wrong with America, not what is good about America. And there is so much good in the American people.
We owe it to our children and grandchildren to give them the information they are not getting in the education system.
With social media it is easy to forward a Reagan speech or an article that talks about values. Make this a project for your family, even if they blow you off at first. It will provide them knowledge for a very interesting family gathering.
Connie Foust, President – Virgin Valley Tea Party, www.virginvalleyteaparty.org
AHHHHH yes, the Reagan Administration – the most corrupt administration by far of any in the past 100 years. Instead, how about forwarding your family President Eisenhower’s last speech where he predicted and warned of the Military Industrial Complex that is so revered by the “conservatives”? I actually was agreeing with your viewpoint until you wrongly decided that it was the “Progressive left’s liberal social agenda” to blame for our woes. It is the continuous wars of choice that have nothing to do with protecting our freedom that are the problem. We were NOT in danger of being taken over or militarily defeated by Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. But war profiteers sure have done well.
John, your statement is as usual BS, progressive’s have done very well in many areas, environment, solar etc. Blame for today’s problem lands on both sides of the fence and corruption is within both parties. Your side has plenty to answer to, didn’t Hillary vote for the war in Iraq? The point of the article was to talk about respecting our youth and giving them more of a viewpoint than what the left is throwing out there. At this point the youth in this country are being victimized by the left with their climate change agenda and so much more. They deserve to hear both sides of an issue and decide for themselves and the left cannot stand to see that happen. It’s always “agree with me or I will trash you” hence political correctness stifles free speech.