Earlier this week, President Obama went head to head with a Tea Party organizer named Ryan Rhodes. Ryan, a leader of the Iowa chapter of that grass roots organization met up with The President as Mr. Obama was finishing an appearance at an open air town hall meeting.
Reminding the President of his call for more civility in American political discourse, Rhodes asked if Vice President Biden’s apparent branding of the Tea Party and its members as “terrorists”, met Mr. Obama’s own threshold of civility. His question referred to media reports, initially sketchy, but just this week verified by “Politico” that Biden had made just such a remark in a private meeting with House of Representative Democrats during a meeting about the debt showdown earlier this month.
In responding to Rhodes, The President said “I absolutely agree that everybody needs to try to tone down the rhetoric”. He then went on to say, “In fairness, since I have been called a socialist who wasn’t born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I am all for lowering the rhetoric”.
So if I’m reading this right, an average, American, perhaps a little more involved in the political process than most, exercising his right to free speech, asks The leader of his country if it was acceptable for his second in command to brand certain citizens “Terrorists” simply because they were more vocal than others in their disagreement with his policies; and The President of the United States essentially said… Well you call me names too! Is this what we have come to?
On the same day that the Rhodes story made headlines, Albert Brown, a retired dentist from southern Illinois, quietly passed away in his nursing home. Brown was 105 years of age. What makes the loss of “Doc” Brown noteworthy was that he was the oldest survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March in which 78,000 American prisoners were driven like cattle, 65 miles through the scorching jungles of the Philippines without water, food, or medical care by their Japanese captors. Nearly 11,000 died or were slaughtered along the way, and those that survived the trek, were forced to endure another three years of tortuous captivity.
Brown’s story has been marvelously chronicled by author Kevin Moore in “Forsaken Heroes of the Pacific War”, and has offered an encouraging road map for today’s Veterans recovering from their own wounds. I mention the loss of Doctor Brown, and the day’s earlier loss of Colonel Charles Murray whose passing five days earlier left us only 84 living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, in the hopes of shinning a light on just how far down the trail of trivialness we have traveled as a nation.
It was Tom Brokaw, the former NBC Anchorman and author that reminded us of that phrase, “The Greatest Generation”. And while defending the freedom of this nation and winning back that same freedom for much of the planet was in itself a task worthy of the monocle, I believe it was that generations underlying character and moral base, forged in the furnace of the great depression, that gave our Parents and Grandparents the strength and perseverance required to reach the heights they did.
To better understand the generation that brought such pride to our nation, one only has to take a trip to Washington D.C. There, in the shadows of Washington and Lincoln, one the eighteenth century Founding Father, and the other the nineteenth century preserver of our nation, stands the World War Two Memorial, a monument not only to those who fought on the battlefields, but to every home front hero and heroine that drove a rivet, polished a shell, or packed a parachute so that the cream of our youth could be sent halfway around the world in defense of our freedom.
While we today look back at those years with the verdict of history in our pockets, for many months, there was no foregone conclusion that we were to ultimately be victorious. Just weeks before the attack at Pearl Harbor, the United States Army was actually ranked 17th in the World! But as Author Walter Lord said, “They had no right to win, yet they did, and in doing so…even against the greatest of odds changed the course of history”. He said of that generation, “…There is something in the human spirit, a magic blend of skill, faith, and valor that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory”.
Can the same be said of the alphabet soup of generations that make up the youth of our country today? Have the “X’s” and the “Y’s” been so indoctrinated by the Rosanne Barr’s and the Rosie O’Donnell’s, that Rosie the Riveter is just one more example of the exploitation of women by a repressive male culture?
Have the antics of the late Ryan Dunn of “Jackass” fame, or Snooki and “The Situation” at the “Jersey Shore” truly become the role models of the generation, that if G-d forbid a global crisis would emerge, would be the ones called upon to step into the same shoes their Grandparents wore, 70 years ago this December.
As the war in Europe ended, and the guns in the Pacific fell silent, President Harry Truman said “Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid”. Were he here today, I’d have to say Mr. President; this is one time you just didn’t get it right.
If the generations that follow so historic a shift to freedom and liberty, don’t forever remember and thank those that made our very being possible, then we are lost for sure. If we have fallen so low as to find news in a “who called who a name” argument between an average American and The President of the United States, then simply finding a solution to the debt crisis will not be enough to save this great land.
I still believe in Ronald Reagan’s vision of a nation, whose best days are yet before it, but only if those that live, work, protect, and defend that nation are worthy of its bounty.
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