In this guest
article, Lucinda Sutherland writes about her memories about being
taught about World War II, and how those lessons have to be taught to
students today.
"Freedom
Is Worth It," By Lucinda Sutherland
December
7th, 2004
As I grew up I had a basic idea of WWII and a
feeling that something remarkable had been done that made the world a
safer, more united place. I have slowly learned more about that
war -- certainly not from history classes, because the boys in my
school learned early on that history teachers were coaches and could be
distracted either by sports discussions or questions like "what did you
do in the war?" So we learned very little beyond Christopher Columbus
and whatever we had managed to pick up in elementary school where all
the teachers were women. Still, I knew that WWII had been truly worth
it, no matter what the final jury decided on Viet Nam.
So I was shocked to go to England and look at
monuments there. They actually had monuments with the names of the men
from their village and inscriptions like "May we never go to war
again." I can't remember the exact words, but the sentiment was that
war is not worth it. I was chilled at the idea that losing their boys
in war was somehow worse than allowing the Nazis to overrun the country
and enslave both their sons and their daughters and pick and choose
whether their grandchildren would even be allowed to live.
We have a concept of freedom, liberty, and hope in
this country that is foreign to most of the rest of the world. We have
the people of the WWII generation to thank for that, but we also have
our founding fathers to thank. That is why it is especially important
that we stop these schools from out-lawing the reading of the
Declaration of Independence!
We need more freedom, we need to defend our
constitutional freedoms! We need to continue being free, fighting for
freedom, and encouraging freedom in others. Our WWII generation
understood freedom and its value; it is what they fought for. We need
to continue teaching freedom so we don't let down those who fought and
died to give us all we have.
Luci
Lucinda
Sutherland is the moderator of The Yahoo Group: “Limbaugh Institute 2”
and can be reached at lucisept61@yahoo.com
