So many of our fellow baby boomers born into the light of freedom don't recognize the darkness just beyond the campfire. (Light and shade work visual magic among everyday objects on the Fourth of July cookout table at Goomp's)
"Without an army of the mind spurring on the powerful, the army of righteous might whose individual members call themselves American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, will never be able to win," wrote first-generation Iranian-American Pejman Yousefzadeh of Pejman Pundit in a March 2002 blog post describing his gratitude at being a new American that Joe Katzman of WInds of Change [via Mudville Gazette] rightly calls "still unrivalled in the blogosphere . . . Required July 4th reading!" :
By continually reminding others why their battle is justified, by showing them that we are grateful for their skills, and awed by their courage, we are giving them invaluable support. No Daisy Cutter is as powerful as a thinking and impassioned American. So to all my fellow bloggers, I have this to say: Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep arguing. Keep confronting. Keep challenging. Keep seeking to persuade. Every myth that you knock down, every tawdry tale of moral equivalency that you seek to destroy, every amnesiac mind to which you seek to restore memory, every malevolent mind whose warped reason you lay bare for mocking, for ridicule, for righteous indignation, and for -- we hope -- universal rejection -- all of that matters. It will help strengthen policy. It will help save the lives of the innocent. And it will help curtail the freedom, and end the lives of those who would wish us another September 11th, and a hundred times worse. It matters. Many of us were driven to blog because of September 11th. We have something to say. So keep saying it. And remember that there are many thousands, if not millions, who listen to us, who are influenced, and who believe it matters too.
It's probably only natural that us baby-boomers and our offspring, who've had the good life handed to us on a silver platter, don't really get it. Isn't it our birthright to do whatever we please whenever we please? Doting parents who wanted their kids to have all the things they never had, businesses and advertisers focused on cashing in on the largest population bulge in history by catering to their every whim, and a politically correct public education establishment increasingly bent on shielding the young from the character-building slings and arrows of outrageous fortune -- have unwittingly done our nation an egregious disservice. Aiding and abetting an unthinking pattern of rewarding bad behavior, they have left great swaths of today's citizenry with no gut understanding of that old saw the truly oppressed know in their hearts, that freedom is not free. We've become morally fat and lazy, and it's the lean and hungry immigrants from oppressive regimes -- together with our fellow Americans like Thomas Sowell and Condolleezza Rice who came of age under a parallel oppressiveness within our own country by virtue of lingering racist attitudes -- it's those who've been on the edge of the abyss who know why our battle is justified.
What an inspiring post !
This is why I am a blog reader as opposed to reading newspapers...
Happy July 4th..!
Posted by: Tara | July 04, 2005 at 10:05 PM
Seems it sometimes takes the new Americans, like Pejman and even "foreigners" like Arthur Chrenkoff to remind us just how fat we have it.
Posted by: Mr.Kurtz | July 05, 2005 at 11:19 AM