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In search of America for Memorial Day — Part 4 of 4

So, how much of an American am I?  Or am I un-American?

The young Army private shown in the photograph to the right is my Dad, John Miller, pictured from when he was serving in World War II.  He helped clean up the mess at Pearl Harbor, among other things in that war to end all wars.  Yes, he earned his way up to the rank of Sergeant by the time his Army days were over and he went home.

This black-and-white photograph of Dad was scanned, captioned, placed neatly into a glass-enclosed triangular case … along with the folded American flag that covered his casket on the day he was buried in central Idaho in October of 1960 after he was killed in a mining accident in Wyoming.  The flag was given to my mother, pregnant with me at the time, and she kept it tucked away until it was given to me last year as a precious gift for my 50th birthday.

Dad was born in Blackie, Kentucky.  He and his older sister Alta didn’t really know their parents either, they both died from illness when their two children were very young.  He enlisted in the Army at a young age, and hunting in the woods of the Bluegrass State and Tennessee made him a good shot.  When he got out, he worked in the mines, moved West to Oregon and drove big trucks in the mountains, went over to the mountains of central Idaho and went back to the mines, met Mom and started a family.

He was a good guy, always looked for any needs that anyone had where he could pitch in and help out.  I know these things because the people who knew him — relatives and friends — told me about him.

Dad was a gentle soul.  He wasn’t big in stature, but his heart was large.  He did love to have fun, in his own ways.  He’d kid around like there was no tomorrow, but not in a mean-spirited way.  When he was pushed to his limits, he’d fight back.  And he could fight back.

I have no idea what his political beliefs were, and I don’t rightfully care one way or another what if any direction he leaned politically.  All I know is that if he saw a need that someone had in their lives, he’d help them out the best way that he knew how.  He didn’t think just about himself.

Oh, I’m sure he’d be all for people standing on their own two feet and giving life everything they had.  He believed in hard work, an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s effort.  He and Mom bought a small sign early in their marriage with one “long word” that was carved out in wood.  The “word” on the sign said “KWITCHERBELYAKIN.”  Say it fast and you’ll know the message behind it.

At the same time, if he saw someone going through a hard time and struggling to pull themselves up, he’d pitch in and help them out.  If it wasn’t through physical effort, it was through financial assistance.

English: Television and radio host at CPAC in .
Conservatve talk show host Glenn Beck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mom was the same way.  They made a good pair.  For the record, Mom has long seemed to have leaned conservative.  But the funny thing is, I know for a fact that she can’t stand conservative blowhards like Glenn Beck, and I’m sure she’d have a pretty tough time putting up with the likes of Rush Limbaugh as well if she ever had to listen to him.

I sometimes wonder what Dad would think if he could see the way we are in this country today.  He might have looked at our polarized ways and shook his head, wondering what the hell he and his fellow soldiers fought for in WWII.  I’m pretty sure it would sadden and anger him.

I do know one thing that would have ticked him off, brought out the fightin’ side of him.  That would be seeing anyone looking at what his son had written as a free American — the right that he and so many others like him fought and died for through so many wars — and suggesting that his son had been disrespecting the memory of America’s soldiers by daring to stand up to claims that he knew were ill-informed at best, dishonest and manipulative at worst.

If it hasn’t been in the words of this blog, it’s been through things that I’ve said in the past through the black ink and off-white paper of newsprint.

Anyone is free to disagree with anything I might say.  That’s the American way.  I won’t shut anyone up, even when they disagree with me.  If I started counting the number of times anyone’s claimed that I have tried to stop their right to speak up freely and had a dollar for every time it happened, well …

My only request is that people come armed with facts and truth and data to back up their claims.   Don’t come armed just with speculation and hearsay and rumors and talking points and, dare I say it, feelings that are the result of some twisted bit of propaganda.  If you want to debate me, that’s fine.  That is, after all, the American way.  But you’d better come prepared.

Propaganda isn’t “the American way,” whether it’s on the liberal or conservative side.  Propaganda wears an evil face.  Propaganda and its results are the kinds of thing we’ve fought against in wars, not the kinds of things men and women have died fighting to preserve in America.

We’re still free to say what we want in this nation.  There’d just better be some semblance of truth to back up your words.  And we as citizens owe it to those who’ve fought for that freedom to take on the responsibility of educating ourselves as to what the truth and the facts are if we truly want to call ourselves “patriots” these days.

And, yet, it wasn’t that long ago that I received a comment from someone here in these very web pages who questioned my loyalty to this country because I dared to post one more thing about one of the biggest propaganda machines we see in this nation today, basically saying that I was un-American.

I won’t play that same childish game myself that so many talking heads love to play while they wave the American flag over their heads so high, at least figuratively.  I can wave that flag myself.

I can and do also get soldiers serving overseas right now applauding what I have to say, in their own way.

That, after all, is what those soldiers represent, among so many other things in this nation.  It’s the freedom that I have to say that anyone claiming that I’m un-American is wrong, and that I don’t have the right to silence anyone for giving their own views.  I respect that.

I also have the right to say that America has some serious problems facing it.  We have essentially become a Third World nation.  If anyone sat though any of the videos that I posted in Part 3 of this series, they’d see that for themselves.

People today live in fear that a revolution is about to take place in this country, when the more apparent truth is that it seems a revolution has already taken place.  Our middle class — the backbone of this nation, which provides so much of this nation’s buying power — is dying.  The middle class is being strangled to death.  If we look at all the numbers that are out there in terms of the direction we are heading, from middle class to the ranks of the improverished, it screams out to us.

The numbers are in the videos that I posted in Part 3 here.  Try and argue against those.  Try and argue against the real life stories that are in them.  That’s real life.  It’s happening today, right in front of our eyes, if they are open.

That’s not what my father fought for.  That’s not what millions of men and women have been wounded or killed for throughout this country’s history.

That is, unless those lives have all been wasted after all these years.

The song “Taps” will be played today in thousands of towns across America.  We have to believe that the song for America for us all to rally around will be one of strength, a commitment to work together to solve our problems.

We can only hope … and pray … on this Memorial Day that better times are ahead.

Copyright 2012, Daddysangbassdude Media

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MEMORIAL DAY SPECIAL: A view from a veteran

By Barry Scott

It is important to honor our veterans on this day for one simple reason: in 1783, representatives of the United States and the United Kingdom signed a treaty ending the war between these two countries that enabled the freedoms we have today.

Unfortunately, there is a freedom — or rather “right” — that has been challenged perpetually since that war of revolution. It is the “right of conscience.”  Never heard the term?  Not surprising.  It is a term that was used consistently by the likes of people that were educated at the best universities in the U.S. and Europe; educated in the Enlightenment, that knew and understood the benefits of science and the danger of allowing organized religion too much power over the lives of its subjects.

They knew the history of the Holy Roman Empire, led by the Pope, as well as the power of the Anglican Church and did not wish to emulate this form of rule over its citizenry (“religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together” — James Madison); they did not wish to lead this country into another “dark age” when heretics were burned and scientists jailed.  It was with this objective in mind that led Thomas Jefferson, in 1802, to pen the letter to the Danbury Baptists that contained this message:

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peal...
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale in 1800. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights …”

Perhaps you noticed the phrase “rights of conscience.”  As many of the Founding Fathers believed — Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and Adams included — the right of conscience was the right of every individual to make the choice of whether to even believe in a divine creator and, if so, how to honor that belief.  Thus, freedom of religion was freedom for ALL religions. This is what Jefferson wrote in his autobiography in reference to the Preamble to the Constitution.  Indeed, what he states is, “where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it would read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;’ the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan [Muslim], the Hindoo [sic] and Infidel of every denomination.”

And while he doesn’t specifically mention it, Jefferson believed, as other Founding Fathers did, that the right of conscience protected atheists as well.  James Madison, essentially the author of the Constitution, wrote in his essay, “A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” that “above all are [people] to be considered as retaining an equal title to the free exercise of Religion according to the dictates of Conscience. Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.”

Note that he, too, makes reference to the “right of conscience.”  But what Madison is saying is that while the majority of us enjoy a freedom of religion to worship God however we see fit, because the right of conscience is God-given, we cannot revoke freedom or liberty to those who aren’t convinced of the existence of God.

This is not opinion.  THIS IS FACT.  This is how Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, et al, believed.  It is why time and again the Supreme Court upholds the ideology of separation of church and state.  Even those courts, where the majority of Justices are Republican-nominated, rule in favor of this ideology.

English: stippling engraving of James Madison,...
English: stippling engraving of James Madison, President of the United States, done between 1809 and 1817. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Madison asks in a letter that he wrote to a friend in the early 1800’s, “is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?”  He answers, “in strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative.”  He also states, “the establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles.”

So, contrary to what the conservative media or your pastor/minister will tell you…

…the phrase “under God”, added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 (the original Pledge did not contain the phrase), goes against the very principles of religious freedom set forth by the Founding Fathers and why courts have not made reciting the Pledge compulsory in schools.

…that while public school sponsored prayer violates the separation of church and state, private prayer by a student IS protected by the First Amendment.  Thus, while a school-sponsored religious organization is not allowed, a student-sponsored religious organization is.  YES, students are allowed to gather together on school grounds and read the Bible.  They’re also allowed to gather and read the Torah or Koran, if they prefer.

But, for those of you who feel that secularism is wrong, let me ask you this: how would you feel if the community you lived in was primarily non-Christian and your Christian child was forced to read the Torah, or to pray to Allah, or to meditate on Buddha? Would you tolerate that?  Why, then, do you ask that people of other faiths — or no faith at all — be required to act or believe as you do? And so, the freedom that has been challenged perpetually since that war of revolution is the “right of conscience.”  Ironically, the challenge comes from the very people who enjoy the freedom that they would deny others.

Barry Scott is an Ohio resident, and served in the United States Coast Guard.

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My music playlist for Memorial Day 2012

Country music is all-American stuff.  Much like jazz, it’s something that can solidly claim that it is American music, through and through.

English: Picture of graves decorated with flag...
English: Picture of graves decorated with flags at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On a day like today — Memorial Day, when we honor those who have fallen in service to our nation — it’s only fitting that we see and hear the performers who’ve brought us some great tunes that honor our country, including those who’ve worn the uniforms of our armed services.

I’m not looking much for the partisan stuff, we get enough of that in our everyday lives outside of music.  I’m looking for the tunes that can make us proud to be Americans, to show our strengths and maybe to address our weaknesses just a touch — hopefully without pointing fingers, but to show how we need to and can pull together, regardless of political stripes, and work together.

I’m looking for music that salutes our service men and women.

That’s some of what country music can do best.  It’s down-home.  It’s America for Americans.

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