I'm going to pontificate for a moment. We have failed our children. WE ALL HAVE FAILED. My kids don't know their history, their ancestry. Where are we from? Who are our forefathers, our blood? Our history has been erased. Grandmothers, grandfathers, gone, unknown. Blood matters. History matters. This is OUR nation, OUR tribute, we BUILT THIS. Happy fourth, brothers.
Start with your towns history. Visit areas with them in town on how it became to what it is today. The best way is with the civil war what state and regiments served in which battles. You can than take them to the gravesites of the men lost who were buried at your town.
Teaching the kids to not listen to their own parents is the first step in the process. Anyone who thinks they can send their kids to public school and then "unteach" them whatever they need to after school is naive. They completely dominate children's lives, demanding not only nine hours away from home, but hours of extra curriculars and busy work for home work.
If a parent tries to question what the school is teaching, their own children will roll their eyes at how bigoted and out of touch their parents are because the school taught them as much.
I found Jordan Peterson's YouTube series on the biblical stories a few years ago. It struck me that the Christian religion that I was raised with (I'm 61) did not dig into the depth of why the stories exist and why they are important. The stories may have been told but the underlying values they speak of were not. Almost everything Peterson said was new to me.
I've come to see that the same mistake has been made with history. The reason why we honor the flag, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence has been not passed down to the younger generations for a least two and perhaps five or more generations. At this point, the stories are not even told and the reason is they are not treasured by the story tellers and the reason for that is because they were not taught the base values depicted in the stories.
Use a smaller brush, pede. Some of us have already been down this road. In another time, the easy answer would have been Scouting.
Look into youth programs like CAP (USAF Auxiliary) or USN Sea Cadets. Unlike the US Army or Coast Guard programs, these are not affiliated with Boy Scouts/Explorers. Both you and your kids will make friends for life in any of these, in addition to gaining valuable knowledge and experience.
Read the founding documents and the Federalist Papers together, especially on Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans' Day. Explain them to your kids.
Something tells me that a great many of those educated by our current university system would have great difficulty in reading and understanding this address.
They’re all literal, they have no real worldly experience and can’t comprehend what our forefathers meant (even the educated ones) because these men spoke with conviction and wisdom.
Never have we ever lived in a time where we can better see the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
This is how I've felt for a long time. I see people who are intelligent but are not wise far too often. People with little application of life experiences. People who form conviction from emotions. It's sad to see.
In early American education, for many Americans, the only book in their house was The Bible - and it was probably the King James version. If your house had two books, the other was likely to be a collection of Shakespeare.
Book collections weren't common in everyday American homes until the cost of book production became more affordable.
It's easy to understand the results when those were the texts your mother used to teach you how to read and write.
I always use the Bible when studying foreign languages to compare grammatical structures, practice translation, learn idioms, etc. I use an English one and one in whatever language I’m studying. Very useful!
Totally! One of the most handy things I did was memorize some verses in the target language that I knew verbatim in English. I broke down the structures of both, and from then on I had grammatical references for the other language that I could simply retrieve from my brain notes during exams lol.
The King James Version of the Bible and Shakespeare were also the main usage examples used in Websters Dictionary up until the 60s.
I bought an Unabridged Websters from 1938 off ebay awhile back and what has happened to English in America, as well as what has happened to dictionaries in general all map to the Sam effort to erasf our history and change definitions of words, as well as destroy nuance.
I thought the same way pede, but turns out it was written and revised several times by The Father of Our Country and a few colleagues. Does not take away from his genius or stature one bit.
Education was exceptional at the start of our country. The words used, phrasing, most wouldn't understand it now or have patience to read it.
We have failed with substandard education. It gets reduced to the lowest level.
The tragic reality is that the public education system is a social welfare program, and as such, has suffered all the predictable failures of any uncontrolled social welfare program.
At best, public education is a bare minimum for those unable or unwilling to provide better for their own children. Long ago, home education and private education were the norm.
Unlike his three elder brothers, Washington did not get to attend England's prestigious Appleby Grammar School. George Washington was homeschooled.
It's frustrating because home schooling takes away a very important aspect of learning to work with others. On the same token a child gets more time invested in their education and real one on one help.
That hasn't been my experience at all. Homeschooling does not necessarily imply working in isolation, and public schooling certainly doesn't necessarily imply learning to work well with others.
I learned from public school that working with others usually meant doing all the work myself while others did nothing at best, or more often, actively worsened the effort.
While homeschooling, my children participated in projects with each other, with other children through coops and extra-curricular activities, and possibly more importantly, with their parents and other adults.
Tossing kids together in a group with other equally ignorant children doesn't teach them anything other than the fact that some children are jerks, and possibly how to be jerks themselves. If you really want your kids to learn to work with others, have them work with responsible adults so that they learn how responsible adults work together.
George Washington's words on foreign policy are truly prescient in this address. I've probably quoted this specific passage a dozen times on this site and reddit:
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
This perfectly sums up the current situation between the US, NATO and our alleged allies. They've done nothing but take, take, take from us and when President Trump demands they pull their own weight, they squeal like rotten children.
How 'unfair' it is that the US wants Germany to pay for the US troops that protect it; or South Korea for the same; or NATO countries to spend more on collective defense; or the EU being personally offended by US tariffs on their goods despite their massive trade restrictions they place on US companies; or the Kurds whom neocons and neoliberals alike believe we ought to start a world war over.
I can go on and on about how our so-called leaders who have showed more favoritism towards foreign nations and even now these ungrateful (mostly European) nations do nothing but whine about how mean the US is and start warming up to China like the sluts they are. The EU's loyalty to Iran is outright unforgivable, but that's even even longer post/topic.
...and that's only a small part of George Washington's speech, he literally lays out exactly what problems the US will face in the future. The only more important US documents/speeches are the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. This Farewell Address needs to be required reading, first in middle school, then freshman in high school and again in their senior year.
Absolutely. I like to bring this out every Independence Day. The revolution is important to teach, but it often overshadows the actual work of constructing a functioning government. Washington's battlefield prowess makes for more exciting imagery, but his political acumen and statesmanship during his eight years as President was far more instrumental to the success of our nation.
"the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism..."
If anyone has a suggestion for a great basic US history course for kids (like on an elementary or middle school level), I'd be all ears. My kids are not getting what they need in school (and that's an understatement).
We home schooled ours, and my wife basically hand-made their curriculum. It's much easier now thanks to the internet. There are tons of quality resources, a lot of them are actually free, but you do sometimes get what you pay for. Of course the whole point is that you can go through them with your children to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different courses and learn how to spot contradictions and unfairly colored language in scholarly works.
We're currently using a course through Udemy.com, which is good, but we still have points where we stop and discuss certain inaccurate language, but those are opportunities to teach critical review and independent verification.
This is technically college level, so it presumes some earlier studies, but it has a lot of good information.
openstax.org (run by Rice University) has free textbooks in PDF form or cheap to purchase in paper form.
Bear in mind, some of these are resources we used years ago, so no guarantees they're still as good as they were.
brookdalehouse.com (has some free curriculum and videos)
Kingfisher's History Encyclopedia is a good book to buy
The National Park Service's website has some good content (nps.gov) Loads of info about historical battlegrounds and memorials.
Historyplace.com had good info on the Civil War. It has a lot of timelines that help put events in order and context with links to engravings and old photos and such.
Also, if you have the time to dig, Library of Congress has books that were actually written in the time available for free online.
That's just a few off the top of my wife's head. My eldest graduated a few years ago, and our youngest isn't that young anymore, so she has nearly two decades worth of resources she's dug through. Never in all that time did we find something we would consider perfect, but I think that's one of the most important lessons. Children should be taught to never take a scholarly work at face value.
Thank you pede! I'm a librarian so I do have access to a lot of free stuff. The problem is I need something geared for non-homeschooled kids who have already been significantly propagandized in school and elsewhere. Then I have a ten year old son who is on the right track (loves Trump) but is too young for anything too complex.
A lively video series would be perfect. It needs to grab them but not be too dumbed down. Thanks for your links, I'll start digging!
Yeah, unfortunately it's been years since my kids were in that age range, so It's hard for me to recall everything. I do remember they got a lot out of doing activities like making "hard tack" to know what kind of food the revolutionary soldiers had to eat.
I've never read them personally, but I've heard good things about Rush Limbaugh's children's books about the founding of the country.
I've looked at hardtack recipes! Ha. We also have the Laura Ingalls Wilder cookbook. Unfortunately I missed the window with my teen girls. They are so uninterested now. However, I think they'd get into it if I did it right.
it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.
My father was a patriotic man who loved history and accumulated a fine library with some great books. He loved to talk about and teach it from the time I was 5 or 6, and never really stopped until he passed away.
Luckily I didn't encounter much Leftist spin on history, but the little I did I had been inoculated against by my father. I knew enough to know when I was being presented with a piece of bullshit and sometimes challenged what I was hearing.
Inoculate your kids. Starting now and keep the effort going - it's a years-long process. And warn them in advance of what they'll encounter in school. Not everyone can homeschool or find a suitable private school. But everyone can try to inoculate their kids.
Unless you've been home schooling your children or have them attending private school, even 12th grade kids are too dumbed down to understand this level of vocabulary. American youth think with all of our technical gadgetry and Internet, they are so smart, but most are practically illiterate now even after college and can't even understand anything beyond a tweet. The literary skills of our forefathers and pioneers, even those who only got up to a 5th grade education dwarfs today's college graduates. Our education system sucks.
That's why I said to read it WITH your children. If you don't have your own children, find somewhere where you can start educating children. I hear a lot of people bemoaning the fact that drag queens are going to libraries to read to kids, but I don't hear about a lot of people dressing up in period clothing to go read to Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" to the kids at the library.
We can't just sit around complaining about problems. We have to start implementing solutions.
TIL: George Washington in his wisdom warned against 'globalism.'
"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it..."
"And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
All obstructions to the execution of [the constitution], all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
Powerful stuff, still relevant--no, especially relevant to this day.
"...that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue..."
It is amazing that he thought of all of this 225 years ago. Getting involved in affairs with other countries that we couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of their conflicts. Guarding against one person rising up from the complaints and grievances of a group of people to take power and then once he has it, cut down the system that got him elected.
I think thats the opposite of what Trump did and that’s exactly what the Democrats WILL do in 2020 if they get Biden in. They will add another two Democratic senators to get the majority, they will abolish the electoral college so that California and New York will pick our President every 4 years, if we even have elections anymore. And the entire system will change and they will make America pay for letting Trump bend them over the table for 4 straight years. Trump got in office with support from a disgruntled group of Americans and now that he is in, he is using the government how it is intended. He isn’t changing the rules.
Look at his relations with foreign countries. You always see these other world leaders clamor to get photo-ops with Trump and talk to him and want to work and make deals with him. North Korea who is evil incarnate, Trump is clear that if they screw with us, we will make their lives miserable but if they cooperate he’s like, Kim Jong Un is my best friend lol.
But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness;
I'm going to pontificate for a moment. We have failed our children. WE ALL HAVE FAILED. My kids don't know their history, their ancestry. Where are we from? Who are our forefathers, our blood? Our history has been erased. Grandmothers, grandfathers, gone, unknown. Blood matters. History matters. This is OUR nation, OUR tribute, we BUILT THIS. Happy fourth, brothers.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for YOU to teach your kids their history. They sure as hell won’t learn it in school, unfortunately.
Start with your towns history. Visit areas with them in town on how it became to what it is today. The best way is with the civil war what state and regiments served in which battles. You can than take them to the gravesites of the men lost who were buried at your town.
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A punch in the mouth is a good place to start. It would be worth the assault charge.
big bad "radical leftists" are always the first one to cry when confronted lol.
They’re also part of the first round of cleansings.
Teaching the kids to not listen to their own parents is the first step in the process. Anyone who thinks they can send their kids to public school and then "unteach" them whatever they need to after school is naive. They completely dominate children's lives, demanding not only nine hours away from home, but hours of extra curriculars and busy work for home work.
If a parent tries to question what the school is teaching, their own children will roll their eyes at how bigoted and out of touch their parents are because the school taught them as much.
Sad.
I believe I know who you are talking about. Darnell is a cuck leftist
What were parents threatened with and who threatened them?
Soo true and soo sad. This hit me hard. We MUST bring back teaching OUR history.
If I may continue the pontification:
I found Jordan Peterson's YouTube series on the biblical stories a few years ago. It struck me that the Christian religion that I was raised with (I'm 61) did not dig into the depth of why the stories exist and why they are important. The stories may have been told but the underlying values they speak of were not. Almost everything Peterson said was new to me.
I've come to see that the same mistake has been made with history. The reason why we honor the flag, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence has been not passed down to the younger generations for a least two and perhaps five or more generations. At this point, the stories are not even told and the reason is they are not treasured by the story tellers and the reason for that is because they were not taught the base values depicted in the stories.
Use a smaller brush, pede. Some of us have already been down this road. In another time, the easy answer would have been Scouting.
Look into youth programs like CAP (USAF Auxiliary) or USN Sea Cadets. Unlike the US Army or Coast Guard programs, these are not affiliated with Boy Scouts/Explorers. Both you and your kids will make friends for life in any of these, in addition to gaining valuable knowledge and experience.
Read the founding documents and the Federalist Papers together, especially on Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans' Day. Explain them to your kids.
I think they would burst into flames tbh
Something tells me that a great many of those educated by our current university system would have great difficulty in reading and understanding this address.
They’re all literal, they have no real worldly experience and can’t comprehend what our forefathers meant (even the educated ones) because these men spoke with conviction and wisdom.
Never have we ever lived in a time where we can better see the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
This is how I've felt for a long time. I see people who are intelligent but are not wise far too often. People with little application of life experiences. People who form conviction from emotions. It's sad to see.
Work in Higher Ed. Can confirm!
In early American education, for many Americans, the only book in their house was The Bible - and it was probably the King James version. If your house had two books, the other was likely to be a collection of Shakespeare.
Book collections weren't common in everyday American homes until the cost of book production became more affordable.
It's easy to understand the results when those were the texts your mother used to teach you how to read and write.
I always use the Bible when studying foreign languages to compare grammatical structures, practice translation, learn idioms, etc. I use an English one and one in whatever language I’m studying. Very useful!
That's a very good idea, I should try that too.
Totally! One of the most handy things I did was memorize some verses in the target language that I knew verbatim in English. I broke down the structures of both, and from then on I had grammatical references for the other language that I could simply retrieve from my brain notes during exams lol.
The King James Version of the Bible and Shakespeare were also the main usage examples used in Websters Dictionary up until the 60s.
I bought an Unabridged Websters from 1938 off ebay awhile back and what has happened to English in America, as well as what has happened to dictionaries in general all map to the Sam effort to erasf our history and change definitions of words, as well as destroy nuance.
As well by their parents and perhaps even their grandparents. I don't think the failure is recent.
And it’s still completely relevant today. Incredible speech
I thought the same way pede, but turns out it was written and revised several times by The Father of Our Country and a few colleagues. Does not take away from his genius or stature one bit.
It was Donald Trump the whole time!
Education was exceptional at the start of our country. The words used, phrasing, most wouldn't understand it now or have patience to read it. We have failed with substandard education. It gets reduced to the lowest level.
The tragic reality is that the public education system is a social welfare program, and as such, has suffered all the predictable failures of any uncontrolled social welfare program.
At best, public education is a bare minimum for those unable or unwilling to provide better for their own children. Long ago, home education and private education were the norm.
Unlike his three elder brothers, Washington did not get to attend England's prestigious Appleby Grammar School. George Washington was homeschooled.
It's frustrating because home schooling takes away a very important aspect of learning to work with others. On the same token a child gets more time invested in their education and real one on one help.
That hasn't been my experience at all. Homeschooling does not necessarily imply working in isolation, and public schooling certainly doesn't necessarily imply learning to work well with others.
I learned from public school that working with others usually meant doing all the work myself while others did nothing at best, or more often, actively worsened the effort.
While homeschooling, my children participated in projects with each other, with other children through coops and extra-curricular activities, and possibly more importantly, with their parents and other adults.
Tossing kids together in a group with other equally ignorant children doesn't teach them anything other than the fact that some children are jerks, and possibly how to be jerks themselves. If you really want your kids to learn to work with others, have them work with responsible adults so that they learn how responsible adults work together.
There's a particular passage about foreign entanglements that Republicans (including us) need to stop glossing over... ahem. cough
Very much so, yes. Belief in that principle has gotten me accused of not being a "True Conservative" on many occasions.
the language was so rich and powerful
I wish I could write that well and eloquently.
George Washington's words on foreign policy are truly prescient in this address. I've probably quoted this specific passage a dozen times on this site and reddit:
This perfectly sums up the current situation between the US, NATO and our alleged allies. They've done nothing but take, take, take from us and when President Trump demands they pull their own weight, they squeal like rotten children.
How 'unfair' it is that the US wants Germany to pay for the US troops that protect it; or South Korea for the same; or NATO countries to spend more on collective defense; or the EU being personally offended by US tariffs on their goods despite their massive trade restrictions they place on US companies; or the Kurds whom neocons and neoliberals alike believe we ought to start a world war over.
I can go on and on about how our so-called leaders who have showed more favoritism towards foreign nations and even now these ungrateful (mostly European) nations do nothing but whine about how mean the US is and start warming up to China like the sluts they are. The EU's loyalty to Iran is outright unforgivable, but that's even even longer post/topic.
...and that's only a small part of George Washington's speech, he literally lays out exactly what problems the US will face in the future. The only more important US documents/speeches are the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. This Farewell Address needs to be required reading, first in middle school, then freshman in high school and again in their senior year.
Absolutely. I like to bring this out every Independence Day. The revolution is important to teach, but it often overshadows the actual work of constructing a functioning government. Washington's battlefield prowess makes for more exciting imagery, but his political acumen and statesmanship during his eight years as President was far more instrumental to the success of our nation.
The first warning about the Swamp:
"the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism..."
This is evidence of time travel!
"But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. "
Excellent post.
We need a library of patriotic texts and speeches on The_Donald.
That's a great idea.
Thank you pede.
If anyone has a suggestion for a great basic US history course for kids (like on an elementary or middle school level), I'd be all ears. My kids are not getting what they need in school (and that's an understatement).
We home schooled ours, and my wife basically hand-made their curriculum. It's much easier now thanks to the internet. There are tons of quality resources, a lot of them are actually free, but you do sometimes get what you pay for. Of course the whole point is that you can go through them with your children to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different courses and learn how to spot contradictions and unfairly colored language in scholarly works.
We're currently using a course through Udemy.com, which is good, but we still have points where we stop and discuss certain inaccurate language, but those are opportunities to teach critical review and independent verification.
This is technically college level, so it presumes some earlier studies, but it has a lot of good information.
https://www.udemy.com/course/us-history-201/
openstax.org (run by Rice University) has free textbooks in PDF form or cheap to purchase in paper form.
Bear in mind, some of these are resources we used years ago, so no guarantees they're still as good as they were.
brookdalehouse.com (has some free curriculum and videos)
Kingfisher's History Encyclopedia is a good book to buy
The National Park Service's website has some good content (nps.gov) Loads of info about historical battlegrounds and memorials.
Historyplace.com had good info on the Civil War. It has a lot of timelines that help put events in order and context with links to engravings and old photos and such.
https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson is a historical reenactor of more mundane day to day life in the 1800s.
Also, if you have the time to dig, Library of Congress has books that were actually written in the time available for free online.
That's just a few off the top of my wife's head. My eldest graduated a few years ago, and our youngest isn't that young anymore, so she has nearly two decades worth of resources she's dug through. Never in all that time did we find something we would consider perfect, but I think that's one of the most important lessons. Children should be taught to never take a scholarly work at face value.
Thank you pede! I'm a librarian so I do have access to a lot of free stuff. The problem is I need something geared for non-homeschooled kids who have already been significantly propagandized in school and elsewhere. Then I have a ten year old son who is on the right track (loves Trump) but is too young for anything too complex.
A lively video series would be perfect. It needs to grab them but not be too dumbed down. Thanks for your links, I'll start digging!
Yeah, unfortunately it's been years since my kids were in that age range, so It's hard for me to recall everything. I do remember they got a lot out of doing activities like making "hard tack" to know what kind of food the revolutionary soldiers had to eat.
I've never read them personally, but I've heard good things about Rush Limbaugh's children's books about the founding of the country.
I've looked at hardtack recipes! Ha. We also have the Laura Ingalls Wilder cookbook. Unfortunately I missed the window with my teen girls. They are so uninterested now. However, I think they'd get into it if I did it right.
This is excellent, and should be seen by all. It's too bad the hand-wringers are getting all the upvotes.
George Washington
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
PRAY FOR OUR PRESIDENT AND LEADERS ! They need it !
My father was a patriotic man who loved history and accumulated a fine library with some great books. He loved to talk about and teach it from the time I was 5 or 6, and never really stopped until he passed away.
Luckily I didn't encounter much Leftist spin on history, but the little I did I had been inoculated against by my father. I knew enough to know when I was being presented with a piece of bullshit and sometimes challenged what I was hearing.
Inoculate your kids. Starting now and keep the effort going - it's a years-long process. And warn them in advance of what they'll encounter in school. Not everyone can homeschool or find a suitable private school. But everyone can try to inoculate their kids.
Unless you've been home schooling your children or have them attending private school, even 12th grade kids are too dumbed down to understand this level of vocabulary. American youth think with all of our technical gadgetry and Internet, they are so smart, but most are practically illiterate now even after college and can't even understand anything beyond a tweet. The literary skills of our forefathers and pioneers, even those who only got up to a 5th grade education dwarfs today's college graduates. Our education system sucks.
That's why I said to read it WITH your children. If you don't have your own children, find somewhere where you can start educating children. I hear a lot of people bemoaning the fact that drag queens are going to libraries to read to kids, but I don't hear about a lot of people dressing up in period clothing to go read to Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" to the kids at the library.
We can't just sit around complaining about problems. We have to start implementing solutions.
TIL: George Washington in his wisdom warned against 'globalism.'
"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it..."
"And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
You don't actually expect that a SINGLE democrat would comprehend this do you? one or two multi syllable words and they are utterly mentally derailed.
Powerful stuff, still relevant--no, especially relevant to this day.
Thanks for posting this. 🇺🇸
I bought a bunch of hardcover copies of Washington's farewell address and gave them out to people about a year ago.
I read and refer to it frequently.
"...that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue..."
Almost moved to tears with how far we've strayed
It is amazing that he thought of all of this 225 years ago. Getting involved in affairs with other countries that we couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of their conflicts. Guarding against one person rising up from the complaints and grievances of a group of people to take power and then once he has it, cut down the system that got him elected.
I think thats the opposite of what Trump did and that’s exactly what the Democrats WILL do in 2020 if they get Biden in. They will add another two Democratic senators to get the majority, they will abolish the electoral college so that California and New York will pick our President every 4 years, if we even have elections anymore. And the entire system will change and they will make America pay for letting Trump bend them over the table for 4 straight years. Trump got in office with support from a disgruntled group of Americans and now that he is in, he is using the government how it is intended. He isn’t changing the rules.
Look at his relations with foreign countries. You always see these other world leaders clamor to get photo-ops with Trump and talk to him and want to work and make deals with him. North Korea who is evil incarnate, Trump is clear that if they screw with us, we will make their lives miserable but if they cooperate he’s like, Kim Jong Un is my best friend lol.
Sacredly maintain the Constitution.