Many progressives today are eager to redefine America not as starting in 1776, which is literally when the very title “United States of America” began, but in the year 1619, before Plymouth Rock and before John Winthrop and the Arabella arrived upon our shores. They instead want to define the nation by slavery and racism. So much so that the New York Times’ 1619 Project dates America that way, defining the country’s start by the year 1619, with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia that year.
But that is not the heart of America. Americans should look back at their founding as based on the principles of 1776—that uniquely great achievement for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that was the Declaration of Independence. These were principles for all of humanity, though they would indeed take decades to fully implement for all Americans, both black and white. Their full achievement would lead to nothing less than a Civil War.
Mobs today target statues of everyone from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to (curiously) Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated the Confederacy before battling the KKK, and even Abraham Lincoln and (most bizarre of all) Frederick Douglass, the brave black abolitionist.
Let us not argue, however, with this historical reality: the United States of America, as our founders conceived it, started in 1776.
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A finales de los años 60, siendo estudiantes en el Tec. de Monterrey, dos amigos y yo alegremente nos dirigíamos a nuestra tierra a pasar las vacaciones de Navidad siguiendo en auto la ruta de siempre. De Monterrey a Laredo para luego tomar la carretera que, a través de Texas, Nuevo México y Arizona, bordeaba la línea divisoria entre los dos países hasta llegar a Nogales y penetrar Sonora.
Sin embargo, el evento nos había causado una multitud de sentimientos encontrados ante este fenómeno desconocido para nosotros. Pero, sin abandonar nuestra actitud de tomar a broma algo que nos parecía despreciable, iniciamos los comentarios. ¿Cómo era posible que en el país más desarrollado del mundo todavía existiera algo tan vil? Pero el futuro nos mostraría situaciones aún más viles atentando contra todo lo que representaba para nosotros una sociedad libre, desarrollada, moral, que supuestamente había ya abandonado las cavernas. Continuando con la broma comentábamos que habíamos pasado “el corte”. Término usado por los ganaderos al referirse a los becerros que los compradores gringos desechaban por no cumplir con la calidad de exportación, y nos seguíamos riendo pues al no ser rechazados podíamos libremente pastar en estos potreros.
Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and its intervention into that country’s internal affairs constitute serious breaches of international law.
After every mass killing, voices come out of the woodwork with the same rhetoric, but very little is done to prevent the next one. The liberal politicians and the main media hoist the banner of gun control. Some conservative politicians and some in the alternative media fly the flag of psychological profiling. Religious leaders call for prayers. Others advocate for more metal detectors and/or armed guards in schools. I think they are missing the root causes of all this violence.