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J.C. Milliman
Patriotism: Nothing worth dying for?

    "There is nothing worth dying for."

    I couldn’t believe my ears. Okay, maybe I could. After all, I was listening to public radio.

    Oh yes, I listen to NPR every morning as I clean out the barn -- the visceral stimulation I get every morning from my daily dose of liberalism really makes the sawdust and horse "effluent" fly and usually propels me to work on time.

    Usually, that stimulation merely makes me think about the opposing view, as slanted and unbalanced as it may or may not be.

    Thinking.

    "Thinking," as Dean Jagger’s character in the Gregory Peck film "12 O’clock High" says, "is something a man ought not to do." I disagree.

    Nonetheless, here I was listening to the Morning Edition crew interviewing high school students in Podunk, USA.

    Some were proud of their fathers, mothers and older family relatives who are overseas in the war effort, others were more ambivalent. One caught my attention and stopped my manure fork in mid swing (much to the dog’s distress who then got a shower of something you don’t want to get showered with at 6 a.m.).

    This MENSA candidate didn’t agree with the War on Terrorism. And that’s fine, I suppose. This is America, after all. But the way he stated his disagreement was something else.

    "There is nothing worth dying for," he said.

    Now mind you, in my opinion, asking a high school student’s view on national policy is not unlike asking a visually impaired person to comment on the Mona Lisa. The answer, while entertaining, is usually rather empty.

    It did get me thinking, though.

    Nothing worth dying for, eh? In America, someone can actually, honestly think that? My goodness, where would we be if our forefathers had thought that?

    Imagine the events of the morning of April 19, 1775. The scene is the commons in Lexington, Mass. Capt. David Parker briefs his assembled militia.

    "Men," the skipper says, "The British Army is headed this way. They are professional soldiers and they have professional mercenaries from around Europe. We are outnumbered and outgunned. If we make a stand, we could all die. Go home, there’s nothing worth dying for."

    As history records, Capt. Parker instead told his men to stand their ground. If England wanted a war with the colonists, "Then let it begin here."

    You know the rest of the story after "the shot heard ‘round the world." The first colony to spin off from the mother country then transformed into the bastion of Freedom targeted today by those who hate Freedom and all it represents.

    Those cold, hungry, rag tag band of colonists harried and tweaked the Lion’s Tail until Cornwallis surrendered the British Army in the Americas at Yorktown in 1781. They decided there was something worth dying for.

    It’s called Liberty.

    So where have we gone wrong that there are those who question the need for Patriot’s blood?

    And lest ye misunderstand exactly who I am about to call out here, I am in no way refering to those folks who's long established traditions and beliefs preclude them from raising a weapon. My farm is surrounded by Mennonite farms who's hard-working proprietors have helped build this country and who, when the times demanded it, contributed to it's defense in their own unique way.

    I'm not talking about them. I'm talking to the cell phone-clutching, BMW-driving, NPR-listening, latte-gulping effete scions of well-heeled American families who's shopping and "Friends" watching time would be seriously affected by 12 weeks of boot camp.

    They may not personally want to die for their country. They call themselves conscientious objectors to be as cool as they think their Canada-fleeing parents were back in the '60's. They're not conscientious objectors for to be so would imply being conscious enough to have rationally thought about the issue sufficiently to have objections.

    I call them cowards. There will always be cowards who shrink from the needs of their own Freedom. But this is America, a place like few others (Great Britain and Australia come immediately to mind) where the cowards are outnumbered by those who understand that a soldier's pack isn't as heavy as a tyrant's yoke.

    And like their forebears in the many wars of this Nation, the patriots understood there is something worth the ultimate price. And they willingly paid. This nation (and a very few others like it) exist because, thank God, we have always been able to stand behind our fellow citizens who have always known the truth behind Thomas Paine’s statement that the Tree of Liberty is refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.

    They have made the ultimate sacrifice when Freedom demanded it.

    And yes, there are a few other countries who owe their freedoms and success today to American, British and Australian patriots who were willing to lay down their lives not only for their own countrie's liberties, for for others' as well. You know which countries I'm talking about. The same ones that are today shrinking from their duty to face down tyranny, oppression and murderous despots so that others may enjoy the liberties we take for granted.

    And sadly, the fact that there are those in our country today who feel free enough to make such statements as the one I heard on the radio is proof that those sacrifices were not in vain.

    So today we stand on Columbia's shores, with the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field behind us (not to mention the smoking ruins of a headquarters building in Beirut, smoking embassies in Tehran and Kenya, smoking holes in the sides of the USS Stark and the USS Cole, and other similar attacks). What now? Do we conclude there's nothing worth dying for and go back to our latte and wait for those who hate us to put us in chains? Or do we, like our President, declare enough is enough, that these attacks on Freedom stop NOW?

    You and I are here because there have always been those who have stood up when their country most needed them to keep Freedom’s flame lit.

    They didn’t think there was something worth dying for.

    They knew it.