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Another 16 Words
Monday July 21, 2003
On April 19, 1775 someone fired a musket across North Concord Bridge in Massachusetts. That round was captured by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in the lines;
By the rude bridge that arched the flood;
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard 'round the world.
In 2003 - 228 years later - few American service members are actual farmers, they're more likely to be called "cowboys" - even though they are likely to be young men and women from the streets of Chicago or Atlanta or Los Angeles or Denver, but the spirit of fierce protection of freedom and liberty is as strong as it was among those "embattled farmers" from Lexington and Concord.
Indeed, there is an unbroken line from that day to this of Americans fighting for freedom - often when it was not Americans' freedom which was directly at stake.
This, notwithstanding the unseemly - indeed ugly - attacks on the President and his Administration by the Liberal Elites because the war against terrorism is not over. They are focusing on the 16 words in the President's State of the Union Address as a metaphor for their having tired of the war on terror.
In newspaper columns and on cable chat shows they influence the national discussion by asking each other - in that wide-eyed, pseudo-surprised way that they do - whether Americans will sit still for an occupation in Iraq lasting for years.
The Sunday shows were chock full of questions among the Elites about "How long?" and "How many?" and "How come?"
In this usage, "Americans" means that poorly-dressed, badly-housed, under-educated, unsophisticated, and justifiably modest portion of the population which lives neither on the Upper East or West Side of Manhattan, nor in the Los Angeles Basin.
What the Elites would call, "farmers."
What the rest of us would call, the descendents of Emerson's "embattled farmers."
In 1945, 51 nations - including the US - signed on to become members of the UN. And Americans have remaind there, despite our being treated like the worlds' Cinderella through the ensuing 59 years and 140 additional members.
Countries have been formed out of other countries; countries which had been under the control of others have been freed; countries (like East Germany) have been consolidated into others; and some countries have combined - Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic - only to revert to their original status.
Through it all Americans have paid the lions' share of the bills, even though our relative power has been reduced from about 2 percent (one fiftieth) to about one half of one percent (1 of 191), thus giving such giants on the international scene as Comoros exactly the same proportionate strength in the General Assembly as the US.
Nearly 60 years having elapsed since the end of World War II, and nearly 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Americans remain in Europe.
The National Democrats and their allies among the Liberal Elites have no alternatives to what Americans are doing there nor in Iraq; nor what other Americans may soon be called upon to do in Libera. Nor what still other Americans are doing in Afghanistan, and in Europe, and in Korea, and in Japan, and in hundreds of other places in dozens of other countries where Americans don't particularly want our sons and daughters to be.
On September 20, 2001 President Bush, in his address to a Joint Session of Congress, reminded us that the war against terrorism "will be a long struggle."
But he also said something else that Democrats would rather Americans forget. At the end of that speech, just days after the attacks of 9-11 he concluded with these 16 words:
"I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people."
Americans remember those words. The rest of the world does, too.
Today, on the Secret Decoder Ring page: The text of Emerson's "Concord Hymn", a link to the UN page showing which country joined when, a map of Comoros along with a link to the CIA Factbook explaining all about it, a map locating Niger; and a link to the Joint Session Address by President Bush following the 9-11 attacks.
--END --
Copyright © 2003 Richard A. Galen
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