Soccer Mom: Unplugged

Some of the most tender parenting moments are when you are able to share with your child something near and dear to your heart.  For some fathers it is football for some mothers it is fashion.  For me, it is history. 

This morning my first grader and I sat down to an American history lesson entitled, The War Begins!.  We read about Minutemen and Redcoats meeting at Lexington.  We talked about the fact that no one really knows who fired the first shot but that poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson called it "the shot heard 'round the world".  As I read that phrase, my eyes filled with tears and in response to his query, I got the privilege of explaining to my boy how valuable freedom is.  That the commodity called liberty is purchased with blood and toil and that many people in the world have yet to taste it.  Time seemed to stand still as we discussed the blood of farmers and artisans spilled to protect the weapons they had stored to protect themselves from tyranny.  We compared the two armies, one prepared, outfitted and funded and the other ragtag and untrained.  Sitting there with my child, I could see in his eyes a small but tangible sense of gratitude and the early stirrings of patriotism.

The beauty of that moment is somewhat muted by the discouraging fact that we live in a nation now fractured by factions who would deny the nobility in fighting for the freedom of others.  Oddly, the same outspoken critics of intervention are the first to call for the brotherhood of humankind - these are they who denounce US policies as imperialistic and demand that our country abandon nationalism in favor of globalism.

How humane is it to watch your brother bow under the burden of brutality?  These dissenters scream shrilly that no amount of foreign aid is enough when it comes to fighting hunger and disease but would let villages suffer repression at the hands of a madman with biological and chemical weapons. 

This form of spoiled elitism, embraced by so many, and falsely justified by spinners and revisionists, undermines the fight we have been fighting at home and abroad for the entire history of this nation:  the long struggle for the freedom of all men.  A war that encompassed tories, whigs, confederate and union soldiers, blacks, whites, property owners, the poor, men, women, children, slaves, share croppers and freedmen.  From it white tenant farmers won the right to vote alongside their landed neighbors.  Women and black Americans were given a voice.  And people of all races, genders, and ages are slowly gaining the freedom that ideally, if not always in practice, we have embraced.  And yet, in spite of the noble ideas that propel this nation and the world forward, there is the overwhelming sound of condemnation of virtually every meaningful international action our government undertakes. 

Amid the cacophony of voices,  loud and angry, you can almost hear the faint, dying sound of an echo - the echo of a shot heard 'round the world.