OPINION:
Given the relentless war on America by our elites, it’s more important than ever to honor our heroes, starting with the man who started it all.
What is Presidents Day — a time to celebrate the high achievements of James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton? In fact, what we call Presidents Day is really George Washington’s birthday, so designated by Congress in 1885.
Historians have called Washington the “indispensable man.” Without him, we would have no country.
There are 31 counties, 241 townships, one state, our nation’s capital and any number of colleges and universities (from Washington and Lee on one end of the continent to the University of Washington on the other) named after the man venerated as the father of his country.
Washington wasn’t just the leader of our War of Independence, defeating what was the greatest military power in the world in the last quarter of the 18th century. Since the Continental Congress was so weak and indecisive, Washington was the de facto head of state from the time he took command of the Continental Army in 1775.
Before he became our first president, Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Only the love his countrymen had for him could have united the nation — Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike — around the United States Constitution. He saved America once during the revolution and saved it again in its tumultuous aftermath. Washington built America with a sword and a pen.
Do you like living in a country where the rights of citizens are enshrined in a written Constitution and a method was established therein for popular sovereignty? You can thank Washington.
The Founding Fathers were a group of exceptional individuals. But we don’t celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Benjamin Franklin’s birthday or Alexander Hamilton’s birthday as federal holidays. Washington alone deserves that honor. On Mt. Rushmore, his face is prominent in a group with Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt — men of no mean achievement.
The “woke” mob hates Washington because it hates America. If it can take him down, it can get anyone.
In Portland, Oregon, during the George Floyd festivities, a statue of Washington was set on fire and toppled from its base, so too an iconic bust of the guerrilla leader on the campus of yet another school that bears his name — George Washington University in D.C. Public schools that used to honor him, in places like San Francisco, have been renamed.
He was a slaveowner — a generation that can afford the luxury of criticizing the past by contemporary standards tells us. Slavery was a great evil, and one which existed for most of human history and on every habitable continent.
It exists today, in other guises.
That China has enslaved the Uyghurs didn’t keep it from the honor of hosting this year’s Winter Olympics. The children who sew soccer shirts in Asian factories (some for as little as a penny an hour) are slaves in all but by name.
Karl Marx (whose writings serve as the basis for the international movement that seeks to destroy America) was a racist and an antisemite, a fact that no Marxist party has ever acknowledged. Marxism itself is a form of slavery. The masses of Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea may not have actual manacles on their wrists and ankles, but their subjugation is just as complete as if they did. An army of Simon Legrees guards their borders to keep the field hands on the plantation.
A little more than 100 years after the beginning of the war to end slavery in America, the Soviets and their East German stooges built a wall to stop their slaves from escaping.
Today, we face an array of foreign foes more lethal and determined than at any point since the end of World War II. How can we expect our youth to fight for a nation that our commissars of culture describe as evil from the outset — not just Washington, but Lincoln (who was willing to compromise with the South in 1861), the Pilgrims, the pioneers who took part in the Western Expansion and the great industrialists of the 19th century?
A nation that allows its heroes to be debunked is doomed.
And so, as the 290th anniversary of his birth approaches, let us drink a toast that echoed throughout the land when our republic was young — “To Washington and liberty.” Without the first, we wouldn’t have the second.
• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.
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