Pride and Sorrow
A recent column by Pat Buchanan begins with the following passage:
When Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war in 1917, the U.S. Army was ranked 17th in the world, behind Portugal.
On Armistice Day, 19 months later, there were 2 million doughboys in France, where they had helped to break the back of Gen. Ludendorff’s theretofore invincible army in its final offensive, and 2 million more in the United States ready to march on Berlin.
No other nation could have done that.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR demanded that a disarmed America “build 50,000 planes”—a seemingly impossible number, but one America met and exceeded.
Starting from scratch in 1941, the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos designed, built, tested and detonated three atomic bombs by August 1945 to end the war.
After Sputnik humiliated America, Wernher Von Braun and the boys at Redstone Arsenal had a satellite up in three months. In 1961, JFK declared we were going to the moon and would be there before the decade was out. Cynics scoffed. This writer was at Canaveral to watch Apollo 11 lift off in the summer of 1969.
Whatever became of that can-do nation?
As an American, and as someone who was just barely old enough to remember the first lunar module setting down on the moon, I am filled with pride to read about what our forefathers accomplished. And I am sorrowful, because it appears that our nation today is incapable of truly unifying behind any single cause to accomplish such amazing things in short spans of time.
I don’t pretend to know what event or movement set us on the course to our present state. Maybe it was the war in Vietnam. Some might suggest it was Watergate. Perhaps the stark changes in the attitude and purposes of the press in the last half of the 20th century were the key piece of the puzzle. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that our people are vastly different from the nation that confronted tyrants in the two world wars.
Having said all of that, I must affirm my conviction that the hope of our people is not, or should not be, in our government or some reform of our political system, but in God. Our greatest needs are not temporal, but rather eternal, and no act of a government or ruler can determine our final destiny as individuals. Even our destiny as a nation is ultimately in the hands of God, not in elected officials or appointed judges.
Because our fate truly is in God’s hands, none of these other considerations strip us of the ability or need to uphold our nation and it’s leaders in prayer, seeking His favor for our future as a free and sovereign society. But let us not confuse the source of our hope because of national pride or political furor.
If you wish to read the remainder of Buchanan’s column, you can find it here.
