This is the time when Americans have celebrated the birth of our nation ever since it actually happened. During the 1940s and 50s, it was without a doubt a family holiday. When I was young it seemed to be a universally happy day in the USA. In the decades since there have been a lot of changes in the narrative and the general attitude about the founding of the country, and whether it should be celebrated.

Unfortunately, there are several generations of Americans who have been indoctrinated into feeling guilty for atrocities on our side. What everyone is missing is the context. We cannot judge another time by our standards. It doesn’t work and it makes no sense. The people of the 18th century saw most Indians as savages. That was a generalization that was not always correct. But those same people also felt it was OK to beat children with a whip or a belt or a cane. They killed animals for sport often cruelly. Cock fighting, bull fights and even dog fights were common. People did not treat animals as kindly as most people do today.

In the mid-1890s, when my grandfather Hale was a boy, he and a friend caught stray cats. They killed them and then boiled them to get the skeleton which he wired together to sell for a dollar. A dollar was a lot of money. Never in telling this story to me, did he show any remorse. In 1949 it was just a story. Something that happened in the 1890s does not equate to our ideas of animal rights or cruelty to them. Does this tale horrify you? If so it is because you are using the sensibilities of a person in the first quarter of the 21st century. But we mix our metaphors all the time.

Recently, I saw the movie called Sound of Freedom with Jim Caviezel. It was dramatic and well-made. It was hard to sit through it, though. The subject is “child trafficking” which is so disturbing, I kept hoping the movie would be over soon. It was a good, powerful, and memorable movie.

But the real “kick in the pants” was a special announcement at the end of the film. Jim Caviezel spoke and told the audience that the movie was made FIVE years ago. It was never shown because they could not find a distributor for it. A lot of powerful and rich people did NOT want to let that movie be seen. This is awful.

I hear people complaining about slavery in the past. They complain and play the victim. They want reparations. The talk about the evils of slavery. And yet they do not lift a finger to help eradicate it. It is going on right now, and people just go on about their business as if nothing bad was happening. We need to talk about the terrible problem of child trafficking at every opportunity. DO NOT sweep this under the rug because it is unpleasant. It simply MUST be stopped.

And here in the USA where we celebrate our freedom from tyranny, people are being arrested for political reasons and put in jail. Political arrests used to be something they did in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia or China. The face that they are happening here should be a terrifying warning to all of us to take our country back. Shame. Shame on us for letting this happen.

Give me Liberty or give me death used to be a battle cry. It was our view of the way our country was founded. One of the main principles of our world was freedom. What happened? Let us all work toward freedom in this country. No more bureaucracy and less government interference in our lives. Stop allowing people to separate us into groups. We are all Americans. We are in this together and we need to work together to stay free.

Copyright©. 2023 Bonnie B. Matheson