I collect quotes. Not from books of quotes, although I have a few. I hear a lot of really clever or ridiculous or funny comments by people on TV or talk radio or I read something especially concise in a book or op-ed and I write it down on a scrap of paper, and later in a notebook. Years of collecting such material has given me a wide range of human opinion, and now that I have a blog I can display some of this wisdom or stupidity to interest or amuse those who stop by. It’s kind of like showing you photos I’ve taken recently, but I know it’s got to be a lot more interesting.
Because this is a blog, I wanted to be sure of the provenance of the quote, so last night I googled something that Theodore Roosevelt said, and I found it. It was in a speech he had given before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899, but when I read the speech the original quote I was looking up was far overshadowed by another passage in the speech, a passage that speaks to us now with special meaning. It’s one of the shiny pebbles you accidentally find when wondering on the beach of life. I read it with a sense of wonder when I saw how well Roosevelt made a point that needs to be made again and again in as many different ways as we can say it, because we are fighting a war that must be fought, and that must continue to be fought. It is an excellent response to those voices crying for peace, for pulling out of Iraq. The words were spoken of a different war, at a different time, but they speak equally to us now:
In a speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899, Theodore Roosevelt said:
If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted upon their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of doom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore the sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations.
The whole speech is an eloquent weapon with which to fight those who want us to run away from our responsibilities in the War on Terror. The site from which it comes, The Theodore Roosevelt Association, is an armory of such verbal weapons against some of those who have lost sight of the true meaning of America and of Freedom. Just as in the war that freed the slaves and kept the United States together, we have other people to be freed, and another land to be restored.
We need to keep in mind that there are Americans in a far land doing heroic things against an enemy that routinely commits atrocities. We need to be proud of our military, to honor them, to specifically recognize their heroic actions. We need to know their names and hear about their deeds. As long as I’m going through some quotes, we should hear from William Bennett, who pointed out in a Newsweek article (August 15, 1977, page 3), that when he was being educated, teachers actually thought it worthwhile to teach youngsters about real heroes:
In all of them it is fair to say that there was a certain nobility, a largeness of soul, a hitching up of one’s own purposes to larger purposes, to purposes beyond the self to something that demanded endurance or sacrifice or courage or resolution or compassion; it was to nurture something because one had a sense of what deserved to be loved and preserved. . . . . From childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood, people I knew went to the trouble of pointing out to me individuals who possessed qualities of human excellence that were worth imitating and striving for.
But we’re not hearing about these military heroes in the MSM. We are given death counts, as though that is all that matters. Two of my brothers fought as Marines in the Vietnam War, 1967-1969, both were wounded, and I know personally that every casualty, every death matters. But as Theodore Roosevelt argued, we cannot judge a war this way. Remember that in the American Civil War there were battles in which thousands of men died in the same battle. The names of Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Shiloh and others speak eloquently of the mortal costs of war. After such losses of life, I can imagine that if the MSM of 1864 had had the capabilities it has today, polls would have been taken that would have shown the popularity of the Civil War at those moments was lower than any of the Iraq polls they produce today. But it is by other measurements that we must seek to judge the war we fight against Terrorists. It is by measurements that are taken in the heart and mind, measurements that are taken by the valiant histories of those Americans who have fought over the years for freedom and human rights, measurements that in the end speak of goals worthy of a great and honorable country and people.
I’ll turn to William Bennett again, for the last word. In his book, Our Country, Our Children, (page 16), he tells us:
.....George Orwell somewhere said that often it is the first duty of intelligent men to restate the obvious. So let me aspire to suggest the shape of the obvious . . . . It is important to know what justice is, what courage is. It is important to know what is noble and what is base. It is important to know what deserves to be defended, and what deserves to be loved.
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