I spent Memorial Day weekend on an emotional high.  When I signed up for the trip to DC, I had no idea I would have the privilege of flying with a bunch of WWII vets. We sang “God Bless America” as fire trucks doused the plane in gushers of water saluting the soldiers.  I swallowed tears when crowds of people lined the gate cheering the soldiers as they deplaned in Baltimore. This is a similar deplaning Reagan International, but that's the experience.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FgecqttxoQg#!

 I thought my heart would break riding the tram through Arlington Cemetery, among “Endless rows for all to see. Freedoms seeds in sorrow sown. These blades of grass and pure white stones.”  I was especially moved by the fields of stones where lay the American Negros who fought for our country in the Civil War.  So much hope.  So much sorrow. 

We had the priviledge of singing at the Kennedy Center accompanied by the Army Symphony Orchestgra.  You see me there, don't you, way up there in the top row?


We visited a number of monuments.  At the base of the North Dakota pillar in the WWII memorial someone had left a frame with pictures of the six Jacobson brothers died in WWII fighting for our freedoms.  The caption read, “It takes a whole family to win a war.” 

The next day I heard Chris Hays explaining that he was “uncomfortable” about calling America’s fallen soldiers “heroes” because it was “rhetorically proximate” to justifications for more war.  His apology the next day was “rhetorically” difficult, but I think he said he regretted the disconnect between the likes of him and those rubes in fly over country who do not have the intellectual capacity to understand his discomfort. 

He sits at that desk in the most affluent city in the world, and he doesn’t seem to understand that that privilege rests upon those graves.  They made his life possible, but he senses a disconnect.   Chris Hays is emblematic of the internal cultural rot that causes a society to decline. 

Our great universities are producing generations of effete snobs who are way too smart to buy into the drivel produced by our founding fathers.  They see nothing exceptional about our country, so in their eyes those silly soldiers die for naught, for foolishness.   

And that’s what divides us from them.  We know that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that the single purpose of government is to protect those rights.   We recognize that no other government on earth was established for that purpose and that purpose alone. 

We recognize that it is only a free people living in a free country where courage and initiative and daring and skill are still rewarded in spite of the restrictions those stunningly brilliant intelligentsia are trying  to harness us with.

We are at a tipping point, however.  Both Democrats and Republicans have conspired to create a government so huge and so intrusive that only the companies that are “too big to fail” have the money and the lawyers and the expertise to work their way through the morass of red tape.  That cultural rot at the head is eating away at the heart of a great nation.