by Frank Hawkins, American Thinker:
When I was a kid in suburban Pittsburgh in the 1950’s, we still weren’t that far from the America of the mid-to-late 1700’s when our country was founded. Even as pre-teenagers, we felt a direct emotional connection to the events of the Revolutionary War and the founding of our country. Many students could recite the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
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Just as nearly 200 years earlier, the printed word was still the primary news and information vehicle for most Americans that commonly shaped our opinions and attitudes. Individually, we communicated the same way our ancestors did, with correspondence written in cursive. Penmanship was an important course in early curricula. We could still read our country’s founding documents although there were rough spots where some letters had evolved from the S that looked like an F and a capital A that looked more like an H. The fact that those founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, had been signed exclusively by white men was totally understood and acceptable.
We recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer at the start of each school day. Most people went to church on Sunday. The image of George Washington praying for guidance while kneeling in the snow beside his horse was both plausible and widely admired.
Almost everyone was related to someone or knew someone who was in or had served in the military. Gold Star families dating back to WWII were common in the community.
We felt a deep connection to the events that occurred nearly two centuries earlier. In many ways we could directly relate to what happened. Those of us who walked to school in the snow could relate to the suffering and sacrifice at Valley Forge and the brilliance of Washington crossing the Delaware at Christmas time to surprise the British. This helped keep the founding of our country relevant and understandable with ordinary citizens.
Today I fear that critical connection is hanging by a thread and will shortly be lost.
For starters, young people today do not read much that is printed and share few if any common news and information channels. Outside of school, my 16-year-old granddaughter’s primary information source appears to be Instagram or possibly Tik Tok. There are literally thousands of electronic communication, entertainment and information sources battling for her attention every day. Everyone has their own chaotic and diverse set of information channels that affect their political direction and daily lives. The value of commonly shared information sources that shape ideas and politics in a cohesive manner is gone. Diversity is the overriding theme of the day.
We live in a world of computerized electric vehicles, joy rides into space for billionaires and celebrities, air travel almost as common as bus rides and kids getting personal cars at age 16. Cell phones and tablets are at the core of modern life and essential to it. None of that was imaginable in 1776 and could only be imagined by a few futurists by 1955.
My granddaughter can read or write some cursive. (She had training in a Montessori school in her initial school years.) But few if any of her schoolmates can. If she must put word to paper, she prints the letters. I have never tested her, but I suspect she would have extreme difficulty reading any of our country’s original founding documents. When citizens of a country cannot read the founding documents, that ultimately can only further weaken their connection with our political roots.
In conservative Florida where I live, many families go to church. However, no prayers are recited in schools except on a few athletic fields. There is no Pledge of Allegiance although the Star-Spangled Banner is sung at the beginning of major sports events at the high schools.
Great and powerful countries are largely defined by their militaries. My granddaughter has a cousin she rarely sees who serves in the Army. But I don’t think she knows anyone else associated with the military other than her grandfather who is a veteran, a now deceased great-grandfather who survived the battle of Iwo Jima and some other distant members of the family. For her, the notion of the military is quite distant and in no way relevant to her life or lifestyle. She has never seen a military parade and probably would not think of going to one. She does not know what a Gold Star family is.
It is more than disturbing that only one in four Americans are qualified to serve in the military. The Army is unable to meet its recruitment goals. The reasons for this are too complex and numerous for this article, but they are highly distressing and are yet another disturbing sign of the growing disconnect our society has with the values of its founding.
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