But after a good cry, wipe the tears and take back our culture and values while we still can.
I write today to cry for my beloved country, the United States of America.
First, a word about that love. I have visited, set foot in, and explored the vast majority of the United States. I have been to almost every battlefield of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. I not only visited Guinea Station where Stonewall Jackson died but even searched irresponsibly with my daughters, then young girls, through endless grain stalks during a Virginia summer’s lightning storm until we found the oak tree at Ellwood Plantation in Chancellorsville where his left arm is buried. After visiting the McCoy family cemetery in Pikeville, Kentucky, I crossed state lines to visit the Hatfield family cemetery in western West Virginia. There we met Henry Hatfield, a grandson of patriarch Devil Anse Hatfield. I was the first Orthodox Jew he ever met. In one of my most forgettable faux pas ever, when my 12-year-old daughter asked me in his presence whether he was messing with us or whether I believed he was a direct descendant, I responded to her, “Yep, he’s the real McCoy.”
I love my country, these United States. From the boiled peanuts and peaches of Georgia to the beignets of N’awlins to the cinnamon-chocolate chili of Cincinnati to the burgoo of Louisville (all of which can be made with kosher ingredients). From the blues of Memphis to the country sounds of Nashville, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Bakersfield to the bluegrass of Appalachia to the Cajun sound and jazz of the French Quarter.
I love the stories of this country’s heroes, and I honor them. In a world where no person is perfect — even though some Jew-haters in the National Football League like the semi-illiterate moron DeSean Jackson and a “comedian” named Chelsea Handler, who broke her promise to leave America if Donald Trump was elected president, both put Louis Farrakhan on the pedestal of perfection — America’s real heroes, despite their flaws, are extraordinary. Christopher Columbus courageously braved fears of deathly peril in a time when people thought the world flat, raised the necessary enormous funds, commanded and inspired the loyalty of sailors of three ships, and blazed the trail to uncover a new world. Andrew Jackson, despite his father dying just after he was born and then his brother dying while Andrew still was a boy, was captured by the British, was scarred for life after he refused to polish a British officer’s shoes, soon after lost his mother to cholera, rose to fight mightily and bravely to defeat the British in New Orleans, was the first elected senator of Tennessee, fought to eliminate corruption in the federal government, paid down the national debt and concluded his presidency with America at a surplus, and physically used his cane to beat up a guy who shot at him and missed. I have visited that statue of him on that horse in all three places those identical monuments stand: in D.C., at the Tennessee state capitol in Nashville, and in Jackson Square in New Orleans.
We Americans are a good people, a fair people. Yes, there are haters in our midst: racists who hate Blacks or Asians or Hispanics or Caucasians, religious bigots who hate Catholics or Jews or Protestants or Muslims, men who hate all women, and women who hate all men. In a country of 300 million people, there will be haters and sociopaths. Consider that world history you learned in high school, back in the days when high schools taught subjects with facts and data, rather than emotive sessions to discuss feelings and how to use condoms. The French Catholics hated the Protestants. The Protestants hated the Catholics. The British warred against all their neighbors, and they against them. The Eastern Orthodox hated the Roman Catholics, and back atcha. Shiite Muslims and Sunnis have hated each other for 1500 years, give or take a week. And they all hated the Jews.
Look at Russia’s history of hate: Stalin’s Holodomor that wiped out millions of Ukrainians. The Chinese persecutions of the Uyghurs. The Arab Muslim slave trade. So, yes, America has had an era of pogroms against Chinese immigrants in California, a bloody Monday massacre of German and Irish immigrants in Louisville, Blacks in Tulsa and Mississippi. There have been eras and specific poignant moments of bigotry against Italians, Poles, Jews, Japanese, Hispanics, and other immigrants. The violent hatred of rioters from the Ku Klux Klan to today’s Antifa and Black Lives Matter. But they all are the outliers. We learned in high school about state-sponsored or government-incited tortures and murders elsewhere from the Spanish Inquisition to the Chmielnicki Cossacks to the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and the Soviet Gulag Archipelago. By contrast, this is and always has been a nation founded on the greatest of values, that all people are created equal.
Our Founding Fathers had it ever-so-right. Justice and fairness do not require equal results, only equal opportunities. Indeed, communism/socialism proposes the injustice of equal results. So if some are born blind, since their vision cannot be restored, shall all others be blinded? If some are born with physical aesthetic deformities, shall others be compelled to line up for deforming? In a world of guaranteed equal results, the incentive to achieve greater is eradicated. That is why the most gifted and productive, the most inventive and resourceful people of other societies that “guaranteed” equal results, but never could produce them anyway, ended up fleeing to America to build this country, where they would have equal opportunity to realize their boundless dreams.
Dov Fischer – The American Spectator – July 18, 2020.
