This is a special post about a text I received from a friend that I felt was worth sharing with my readers as a reminder of our past and present, and as we head into our future. Around the country, these words will resonate in the hearts, souls, bodies, and minds of all true patriots of this country, flag, history, and people. Feel free to share it within your circles. God bless you, your family, our President, Our Military, and the United States of America. Enjoy!
Article written by Senator Chris McDaniel:
Every July Fourth, we get the lecture.
You know the one. Before the flags are even out, before the ribs are on the grill, and before the first child writes his name in the dark with a sparkler, somebody has to remind us that America has sinned.
As if history were a secret. As if every nation on earth hadn’t dragged its own chains through the dust.
I’m tired of the lecture.
Not because America has been perfect. She hasn’t. Not because our people have always lived up to our founding promises. We haven’t. But because the sermon is dishonest. It acts as though America is uniquely guilty, uniquely stained, uniquely unworthy of affection.
That’s nonsense.
All nations have had their evils. England gave us the common law, trial by jury, and a great inheritance of ordered liberty. But England also built an empire that stretched across the globe, ruled distant peoples, extracted wealth, and left wounds from Ireland to India to Africa.
France gave us Lafayette, art, and revolution. But France also gave the world the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, colonial brutality, and a revolution that too often mistook bloodshed for virtue.
Germany gave mankind Bach, Beethoven, Luther, Goethe, science, industry, and philosophy. But in the twentieth century, it also gave the world Nazism, death camps, and mechanized murder on a scale almost beyond speech.
Russia gave the world Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It also gave the world Lenin, Stalin, the gulag, forced famine, secret police, and millions entombed beneath the machinery of the state.
China gave mankind ancient wisdom, invention, poetry, and civilization. But Mao’s communism starved, purged, and terrorized millions. And today, the Chinese Communist Party still crushes speech, religion, dissent, and human dignity under the heel of the state.
Japan gave the world discipline, tradition, and astonishing industry. But Imperial Japan left a record of conquest, massacre, forced labor, and cruelty across Asia.
The Middle East gave the world prophets, trade, learning, law, and ancient faith. But many of its governments have persecuted religious minorities, suppressed women, silenced dissent, and treated liberty as a threat.
Africa is filled with ancient peoples, deep cultures, faith, and endurance. But its history, like every continent’s history, is not clean. Long before modern lectures about America, rival tribes and kingdoms fought wars, took captives, and sold human beings into bondage.
Human history is not clean. It is not a children’s book. It is a long record of kings, empires, mobs, armies, prisons, plantations, purges, castes, camps, colonies, and graves.
So spare me the idea that America is the villain of mankind.
America did not invent evil. America gave evil an enemy.
That enemy was a written Constitution. Separated powers. A Bill of Rights. Trial by jury. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Due process of law. The right of the people to keep and bear arms. Elections. Appeals. Newspapers. Churches. Town halls. Courthouses. Ordinary citizens with the lawful power to tell the government no.
That’s the American miracle. Not that we’ve never failed. But that our founding principles gave us the tools to correct our failures.
In many countries, injustice was the law and stayed the law because no one could challenge the state. In America, the oppressed could eventually appeal to the Declaration itself. They could point to those words, all men are created equal, and say, “You promised.”
That promise changed the world. It still does.
So this Fourth of July, I won’t apologize for loving my country. I won’t join the chorus of professional scolds who mistake contempt for intelligence. I won’t pretend that gratefulness is ignorance or that patriotism requires blindness.
I know America has scars. But I also know what she has given the world: a republic where power is limited, a Constitution that restrains rulers, and a people who can worship, speak, vote, assemble, publish, protest, defend themselves, and govern themselves.
That is rare. That is precious. And that is worth celebrating.
So let the lecturers lecture.
I’ll be outside with the flag, thanking God I was born under it, and the coverage around the country and the globe showing their respect to our nation in a resounding display of fireworks.
Amen
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