© 2009 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
In the last month I have been occasionally blue thinking of my father, who passed away in 1993. Many of his formative years were spent fighting for freedom. First he fought World War II on the frontlines in person, and then, I have come to realize, he fought parts of that war again for the rest of his life in his head.
I went walking the other day thinking of how in just one year America changed. I thought, “And the thanks he gets for all of those days on the frontlines protecting our country is that after his death America lurches toward a socialist agenda as bad as any he fought against in the service of his country. If he was not already dead, this would kill him.”
My father was the son of a combat veteran who was wounded in World War I so that his son could live in freedom. In those first, dark days of World War II, my father left high school a semester before graduation to join the military. When his classmates were graduating he was already finishing his advanced training. Then on Nov. 8, 1942, he landed with the first troops in North Africa and the war for him was on until he got back to the states in late 1945.
A few years later there was his time in Korea. He also served a tour of duty in Vietnam. In 1967 he retired. He sometimes was still called, “Sarge,” at the NCO club by friends who also served in combat.
As our country slipped further and further from freedom into a socialistic government he said little, as was his lifelong habit, but he listened on radio and watched on television those people who protested loudly our movement away from the freedoms of our forefathers.
Letting my father’s generation down
Truth be known, most people today are willing jailers of themselves. They rush to give up their freedoms for the illusionary promise that the government will take care of them better than they could take care of themselves. My father would have seen the error of that thinking.
Despite being on the front lines of war for many years of his adult life, my father only had internal wounds of his soul. He did not talk of the horror he had seen, but it seemed as I watched him he would often quietly think back on those days and lost comrades.
My generation has let my father and his generation down in the protection of America’s freedoms. Freedom remains only as long as each of us fights for it. Every second there are the forces of evil trying to enslave all of the people of the world. Many of people of our world live in countries where they have never tasted freedom. Here in our country, the people who really believe in freedom are becoming less and less heard.
Thundering herds of mindless people jump lemming-like over the cliff into socialism with no understanding of or concern that they are giving up their freedoms. They forever destroy their own freedoms while they also destroy the freedom of generations to come.
An America without freedom
I am deeply troubled that my father and millions of other soldiers gave so much — some gave even their last full measure — so that future generations could be free. And I sometimes think that I am the last generation to have tasted that freedom.
In countless graves are soldiers who fought for freedom in America’s wars. Even sadder are the many military graves of unknown soldiers with these 13 words: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”
I will visit my father at the Ft. Bliss National Cemetery this week. I hope I can explain to his gravestone and those around it how my generation let their years of fighting totalitarian governments go for naught and inexplicably decided to embrace an America without freedom.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.