God Blessed the USA

 

It’s a sad fact that most of the people protesting in the streets in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, and Chicago have never been outside the United States. They have never seen the difference between the appearance of liberty, and the true embodiment of it. Even though many in the Democrat party have been outside the country, they do not appear to have learned the lessons from travel that I did.

In 1970 my stepfather was assigned to Clark Air Base in the Republic of the Philippines. I went to high school there, graduating in 1973. Clark sits in a large flat area cleared from the jungle and at the time served as a base of operations for aircraft flying sorties in the Vietnam war. I remember vividly that Mrs. Mattingly, one of our teachers at Wagner High School, wore her husband’s POW bracelet. In that bamboo steamer of a country, I came to appreciate the differences in outlook between a country built on the rule of law, and a country built on the rule of one man.

The Philippines had the trappings of a republic without the blessings of liberty. It had a senate. It had a lower chamber. It had a president. But the true reins of power were held, not by three co-equal branches of government, but by a dictator that looted his country’s treasury while his citizens lived in squalor. While common folk struggled to maintain food on their table, the Marcos family ate lavish meals in palatial splendor. Even in high school, I knew that was wrong.

The highways and roads were functional, if not up to American standards, but outside Manila there was a five-mile stretch of superhighway – paid for with US funds – that was supposed to connect the capital to Clark. The Philippines ran out of money after five miles. It’s almost like they learned from their American friends that the easiest way to get more money was to spend it like drunken sailors.

While there were “slicky boys” around Clark, and all manner of petty crime, the Filipinos who worked on the base were calm, competent, hard-working people who I respected and admired. After working all day in air-conditioned comfort they would walk outside into 90-degree heat and 100-percent humidity, get on a non-air-conditioned bus, and ride to the main gate. There they would exit and head off to their homes, which were often no more than shacks constructed out of native materials. But every last one of them held their heads up high. They had the dignity of work.

But I learned the most valuable lesson I could about due process not in law school, but at that main gate of Clark Air Base a few months before I returned home in 1972. As I waited for a friend to come on base to go to a movie, I saw Air Force Security Police chasing a Filipino who was leaving them in the dust. As their Sam Browne belts clanked and jingled as they ran after him, he dashed through the gate while they were yelling “stop!”

The Security Police did not pull their weapons. I learned saw he had stolen a wallet on the bus. He was no master criminal, just an opportunist. But as the Philippine Constabulary (or was we called them, the PC) on the other side of that gate heard the Security Police yelling “stop” he drew a revolver, pointed it in the air and fired off two shots. The running Filipino turned to look and saw the constable drawing a bead on him. He hit the dirt and threw his hands over his head. The PC kicked him in the ribs, stomach, and head and would have beaten him in the head with the pistol had not the gasping Security Police shown up. The PC slapped the cuffs on the man, removed the stolen wallet from his pants, flipped it to the Security Police, and then used his baton leveraged inside the cuffs to force the thief forward to the jail.

The Philippine people were good people. They were hard-working people. They have a beautiful country. They have a very aggressive police force and they also have corruption, sadly, at all levels of their government.

We have some bad police officers in this country too. My wife met one a few years back when she got a speeding ticket and he got right in her face and told her that if she didn’t pay it before the court date they would issue a warrant for her arrest. It upset my wife terribly, and there was no call for it. He just needed to bully someone. But he couldn’t hit her. He couldn’t beat her. He couldn’t treat her less than human without significant problems coming his way. There are bad police shootings. I know because I’ve handled some of those lawsuits. I’ve seen cities pay for their officer’s misdeeds. Money is a very poor remedy when someone dies, but it’s the only way we have for accountability. But it is a remedy. That Filipino had no remedy. He also probably didn’t have working ribs. Sometimes suing is the right thing to do.

Sometimes it isn’t. And jumping to conclusions about who is in the right and who is in the wrong while the smoke is still clearing is not the way to improve policing either. Accountability demands evidence and analysis, not emotion and indifference to fact.

In 1978 I went to the Republic of Korea to serve in the Second Infantry Division. The Second Infantry Division had a large contingent of Korean Army soldiers called KATUSAs. It stood for Korean Augmentation To the United States Army. When I was in basic training I had a drill sergeant that would have made King Kong scamper up the Empire State Building with no more than a stare and a cross word. But the KATUSA Sergeant Major instilled such fear in those young men that I never saw one out of uniform. I’m pretty sure he would have scared my drill sergeant. Everywhere KATUSAs went, they went in a uniform with enough starch in it that it could probably have stood up by itself.

In visiting with one of the KATUSAs assigned to our company I learned that he had a cousin in prison and that he sent some of his meager pay to his aunt every month to help her feed him. He told me that prisoners get some rations, like a nasty dish called Kongbap, but that family members visit frequently and bring more food to ensure their loved ones stay healthy. He described Korean prison life in terms that made it seem unlikely that a life sentence lasted longer than a few years.

Yes, we have problems in our prisons, and we have problems with our police, but we have a justice system that sometimes seems to give more aid and comfort to the victimizers than the victims. Sometimes it seems wrong to do that, but then I remember what my KATUSA friend told me.

Don’t misunderstand. I never saw anyone in Korea treated the way I saw the PC treat that thief. The Koreans I met were proud of their country and believed fervently in the values of work and freedom. But they had an unforgiving penal system. Maybe, thinking about what happened in Kenosha the past few days, in some ways, we could learn something from them.

Last night the RNC put on a convention presentation that established a few things. Republicans love America. They think our best days are ahead. They recognize we have a long way to go to create a more perfect union. The star of the night, from my viewpoint, was Maximo Alvarez. I teared up listening to his story. He spoke a brutal truth, and his sincerity and emotion were honest tributes to this country just as they were stinging indictments of socialism.

I look forward to tonight’s convention speeches. I love my country, and I love to hear people who love my country speak about it.

As everyone who spoke last night said, may God bless America.

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  1. CACrabtree Coolidge
    CACrabtree
    @CACrabtree

    Yes, the term is called “provincial” and as improbable as it might seem, it’s a term that I would apply to 90% of Americans under the age of 30.  Most of their life experience is gained through their social media and college professors who are scarcely smarter.

    I would wager that the typical young person, who has put in 3 or more years in this nation’s military, has a vastly superior worldview than a college graduate who has not.

    • #1
  2. cdor Member
    cdor
    @cdor

    Nice post @anthonydewitt. Most of us on this website can call ourselves that which I also call President Trump–pragmatic conservatives. Of course, there are many highly learned and intellectual people posting and commenting here. I happen to believe that conservatism is best learned from life experiences. I know some will disagree. Somehow I do not think you will, however. The Republican convention has been outstanding. Many of the best moments have been produced by the average pragmatic conservative plucked right out of our midst. 

    • #2
  3. Joe Boyle Member
    Joe Boyle
    @JoeBoyle

    If you want to see a grown man cry, tell him he’s going to ROK MP Headquarters.  The Korea version of the Pentagon was across the street from where I worked. When a VIP was leaving a ROK MP would run out and stop six lanes of traffic. One day an impatient cab driver kept inching forward. Each time the MP would yell at him. When he got tired of  yelling, he jumped from his pedestal, jerked the driver out of his cab, beat the snot bubbles out of him, stuffed him back in his cab, and then released the traffic.

    • #3
  4. Anthony L. DeWitt Coolidge
    Anthony L. DeWitt
    @AnthonyDeWitt

    cdor (View Comment):

    Nice post @anthonydewitt. Most of us on this website can call ourselves that which I also call President Trump–pragmatic conservatives. Of course, there are many highly learned and intellectual people posting and commenting here. I happen to believe that conservatism is best learned from life experiences. I know some will disagree. Somehow I do not think you will, however. The Republican convention has been outstanding. Many of the best moments have been produced by the average pragmatic conservative plucked right out of our midst.

    It is one thing great about America.  Average people do extraordinary things because freedom allows people to dream, and dreaming allows people to accomplish things others never thought of.  How else do you explain FedEx? Apple?  These are institutions that got their start from the mind of a man who lived a free existence and sought to improve it.  I would agree with you completely on conservatism being born from life experiences.  I once knew a lawyer who said that every other day of the year he was a liberal, but he was a conservative on April 15.  It was a disingenuous statement in my view.  He wasn’t really a conservative.  Because he did not believe as a conservative.  He had not ever served in the military.  He’d enjoyed a fine education paid for by Daddy, and a law school education paid for by Daddy, and now Uncle Sam was Daddy.  He liked the idea of a nanny state.  Not me my friend.  I prefer my liberty.  Thanks for your kind comments.

    • #4
  5. CarolJoy, Thread Hijacker Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Thread Hijacker
    @CarolJoy

    Thank  you for your description of what you observed while overseas.

    In 1979, I  stayed in Norway for a three month period, followed by touring around Europe for three weeks.

    One of the huge differences between the culture and society of our nation and that of others is that in the USA, every other neighborhood in the country has some type of annual community sponsored get together. So if you just moved into Sakawahnnee Falls, you can meet all your neighbors. Within a year or two, you can be one of the crowd.

    In Norway, you were considered a “newcomer” if your family had moved from Oslo to Stavanger some  150 years earlier. A newcomer!

    I think this difference  is due to how our nation began its life as  a frontier, in which continual groups of immigrants moved from the Eastern seaboard out West. There was a lot of solidarity in terms of people helping people out. People relied on each other; they had to or else.

    As awful as America’s war involvements have been, they too had  people realize that we are all the same. Reader’s Digest did a recent  story on how during the Civil War, a family  in New England rescued a Confederate soldier who was being starved by the circumstances he was in. Meanwhile in Virginia, a family took care of a wounded Union soldier by nursing him back to health. Both families were verbally attacked and shunned by other members of their community, but they acted on Christian principles. After the war was over, and each soldier returned to his rightful community, there was continued correspondence and eventually reunions between the families that had been rescuers and the soldiers they had helped. 

    My father’s war experiences in WWII had him change misconceptions he had held about African Americans. For a few days during the Battle of the Bulge, he & several other soldiers were “guests” of a group of African Americans, who shared their rations, ammo, and whatever there was in the way of shelter. Sharing rations might not seem like a big deal, but when people are down to their last few cans of chow, and their last few precious smokes, and no one knows when supplies will show up if ever, it is a really big deal.

    When I moved to rural Lake County, and some mishap occurred, I was always amazed how everyone joined in to help. One time a car went spinning out of control in a rain storm, and I immediately stopped to see if the driver was hurt. Within five minutes, six other drivers had also pulled over to help out. Meanwhile back in liberal East Bay of San Francisco, a young college student died inside an area leading to the subway. He had  gone into a diabetic coma, probably around 2Am. And no one noticed him or reported his body lying there until 10Am when it was too late to help resuscitate the young man.

     

     

    • #5
  6. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Anthony L. DeWitt: It’s a sad fact that most of the people protesting in the streets in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, and Chicago have never been outside the United States. They have never seen the difference between the appearance of liberty, and the true embodiment of it.

    I wish these rioters could spend a month in Venezuela or Cuba.  Just sayin’ . . .

    • #6
  7. cdor Member
    cdor
    @cdor

    Stad (View Comment):

    Anthony L. DeWitt: It’s a sad fact that most of the people protesting in the streets in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, and Chicago have never been outside the United States. They have never seen the difference between the appearance of liberty, and the true embodiment of it.

    I wish these rioters could spend a month in Venezuela or Cuba. Just sayin’ . . .

    I wish they would spend the rest of their lives in Venezuela or Cuba…all of them.

    • #7
  8. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    cdor (View Comment):

    Stad (View Comment):

    Anthony L. DeWitt: It’s a sad fact that most of the people protesting in the streets in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, and Chicago have never been outside the United States. They have never seen the difference between the appearance of liberty, and the true embodiment of it.

    I wish these rioters could spend a month in Venezuela or Cuba. Just sayin’ . . .

    I wish they would spend the rest of their lives in Venezuela or Cuba…all of them.

    I’d take back the ones that admitted they were wrong.  Not sure how many that would be, though . . .

    • #8
  9. Anthony L. DeWitt Coolidge
    Anthony L. DeWitt
    @AnthonyDeWitt

    Stad (View Comment):

    cdor (View Comment):

    Stad (View Comment):

    Anthony L. DeWitt: It’s a sad fact that most of the people protesting in the streets in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, and Chicago have never been outside the United States. They have never seen the difference between the appearance of liberty, and the true embodiment of it.

    I wish these rioters could spend a month in Venezuela or Cuba. Just sayin’ . . .

    I wish they would spend the rest of their lives in Venezuela or Cuba…all of them.

    I’d take back the ones that admitted they were wrong. Not sure how many that would be, though . . .

    I believe, like our President, that this is a nation of second chances.  I too would take back the ones that agreed they had acted rashly and had not understood how much better life here is than life in a socialist country.  I love my country.  I always have.  So I’m with you on this one @stad.

    • #9
  10. cdor Member
    cdor
    @cdor

    OK, OK, OK…take back the ones who say they are sorry. But no Ilhan Omar’s PLEASE!

    • #10
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