It can be argued that the United States Of America has never been a country at peace and that really our entire modern civilization continues to be shaped by warfare. The politics of the many conflicts aside, the fact that young men and women have been willing to charge into a hail of bullets and sacrifice their lives for the lofty values espoused by America must never be forgotten.
Most Americans do not know the true meaning of the word fear. Most of us live in the cozy confines of a lifestyle aided with gadgets and gizmos that connect us to a world where we can expect the electricity to work, the toilet to flush and the pizza to arrive at the door in 30 minutes or less.
The greatest fear most Americans experience today is the worry that their car battery might drain during the night and the car won’t crank in the morning. Even that scenario doesn’t really cause fear because a dead battery really only means having the inconvenience of having to call an Uber.
Despite the claims of ANTIFA, no one living in America today has to fear being shackled, marched onto a platform and publicly sold into a life of slavery. A soldier in the distant past gave his life to eradicate that fear.
However, slavery still exists in the open in other parts of the world. Try being a part of the wrong clan in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Sudan, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria or The Philippines, and you will know the real fear of slavery.
Members of Black Lives Matter march in the streets, and some of those protests against police have burned violent. However, the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans do not know what it really means to fear the police or live in a police state.
College campuses across the nation have set up “safe spaces” so that students can be free from the fear of oppression by those who think differently from them. American society disavowed segregation generations ago. No one living in America today has the fear of being forced into a ghetto by the majority.
Americans do not have the fear that one political party will seize control and place a Hitler or a Stalin at the head of a totalitarian government because the American military is there to assure the peaceful transfer of power. The people of China and Russia have no such guarantee.
President Franklin Roosevelt famously declared, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
Today, we no longer even need to fear “fear itself,” and the reason for that can be traced to the graves of thousands of American soldiers who set aside their real fear of death, trudged past the real gates of hell and laid their lives on the altar of freedom.
From the battle of Breed’s Hill, the killing fields of Gettysburg, the trenches of France, the beaches of Normandy, the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, the American soldier has never fought for a particular political ideology, but rather for the ideals espoused by the Declaration of Independence: that all men have the God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We must remember that across the world, people do live in legitimate fear, but as long as America has young men and women willing to fight and die for the liberty of others, our children and grandchildren will never have to experience true fear.
Scott Hudson is the Editorial Page Editor of The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com.
