Mankind's Greatest Hour

Today, as we fire up our grills and crack open our beers, let us remember why we even have a July 4th holiday: to commemorate the greatest act of shared, selfless courage the world has ever seen.

Everybody should know that Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Most people know the names of a handful of the 56 men who signed it, such as John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and of course Jefferson himself. But few people seem to realize that when those men signed their names, they were committing what was considered an act of treason against the British crown, punishable by death. Those men were property owners who were successful in their lives and businesses. Their lives were comfortable and they stood to lose everything by signing the Declaration -- yet they chose to sign it anyway, because they knew that casting off the crown and forming a new government based on individual liberty was the right thing to do, not only for their own descendants but for all of humanity. And here is what happened to some of those men after they signed the Declaration:

Five of them became prisoners of war.

Nearly one-sixth of them died before the war ended.

British forces burned, and/or looted, the homes and properties of nearly one-third of them.

When the British did that to the property of William Floyd, he and his family fled and spent the next seven years living as refugees without income. His wife died two years before the war ended.

After being forced into the wilderness by British forces, John Hart struggled to make his way home. When he finally got there, he found that his wife was dead and his 13 children were missing. He died without ever seeing them again.

Richard Stockton was dragged from his bed and sent to prison while his property was ravaged. From the day of his release from prison until the day he died, he had to rely on charity from others to feed his family.

Francis Lewis’s wife was imprisoned and beaten. Meanwhile, his wealth was plundered. His last years were spent as a widower living in poverty.

Thomas Nelson Jr.’s home was captured and occupied by British General Cornwallis, who used it as what we would now call an operations center. Therefore, Nelson ordered his troops to destroy his own home with cannon fire during the Battle of Yorktown. To assist in funding the war, he used his own credit to borrow 2 million dollars, which today would equal more than 25 billion dollars. Repaying that debt bankrupted him, and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave.

It is a safe bet that fewer than one percent of our citizens have ever heard of these people, much less know anything about the devastating sacrifices they made so that future generations could have the freedom necessary to build the kind of upwardly-mobile, always-progressing society we would come to take for granted.

The Founding Fathers bequeathed to us a wonderful gift called America, and we owe it to our children to make sure we don’t allow that gift to be destroyed. We should never hear the words “Fourth of July” without feeling a skip in our heart and a tear in our eye.

Much thanks to Jeff Jacoby, the late Paul Harvey, and all the others who have written and spoken about the fates of the signers, to keep their story alive.

A Birthday Homage

Ten years ago I published this tribute to Thomas Sowell when he turned 79. Today he turns 89 and is still kicking strong, having released a new book within the past year. So today I am re-publishing my decade-old post unchanged, then-current hyperlinks and all. Happy 89th birthday Mr. Sowell!

In 1930, an age when the South was ruled by Jim Crow and the country was about to get plunged into the Great Depression, Thomas Sowell was born fatherless and black in rural North Carolina.

His aunt relocated him to Harlem and raised him as her own. In his teenage years, economic hardship compelled him to drop out of high school and join the workforce. Four years later, he was drafted by the Marines at the height of the Korean War.

After his military service was done, Sowell got his GED and used it as a springboard to a remarkable career as a scholar and researcher. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, master’s from Columbia, and doctorate from the University of Chicago, then went on to teach at Howard, Cornell, Brandeis, Amherst, and UCLA. He has been associated with four major research centers over the years, most notably the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

A true thinker, as opposed to one of the touchy-feely sorts who have taken over academia, Sowell has mastered the rare art of pursuing truth above all else. Unlike most people, he follows the facts and honestly reports them, no matter where they lead; he meticulously sets aside emotions and pre-conceived notions, in order to analyze evidence thoroughly and objectively; and he is far more concerned about being right than he is about being liked. These qualities led him to become a staunch and unapologetic defender of capitalism, after having started out as a Marxist.

Over the years he has penned numerous essays, dozens of books, and thousands of editorial columns. His essays have been published in magazines, and his editorials, which still average more than two per week, are syndicated in newspapers and on web sites across the land. And no matter how complex or unconventional his topic, he always makes his point in clear, unambiguous language because he understands what too many writers do not -- that the whole point of writing is for your audience to understand you.

Thomas Sowell’s writings pack a philosophical punch like no one else’s. When I read one of his works, I can sense myself thinking faster and clearer than before and it feels like I have a buzz. During the pre-Internet days, I felt let down every morning the Tampa Tribune failed to feature Sowell on its editorial page.

Though he is known mostly for his championing of judicial restraint and laissez-faire economics, he deals with all kinds of subjects and many of his writings are sociological. In one series of books he explores the phenomenon of children who begin talking late in childhood and are often misdiagnosed as being autistic.

Today is Thomas Sowell’s 79^th birthday. If you have never read any of his works before, I encourage you to do so. His web site is here, and you can read his takes on a particularly timely topic here and here. And finally, here are some of his “pearls of wisdom” that I have collected over the years:

A gullible people cannot indefinitely remain a free people.

Do not expect common sense to return to the criminal justice system by itself. The commonness of common sense makes it unattractive to those whose whole sense of themselves depends on their feeling wiser and nobler than the common herd.

All human beings are so imperfect, no matter what color wrapping they come in, that to exempt any group from the standards of performance and behavior expected of others is not a blessing but a curse.

Nature lovers marvel that newly hatched turtles instinctively head for the sea. But that is no more remarkable than the fact that people on the political left head for occupations in which their ideas do not have to meet the test of facts or results.

For gun control laws to be effective, criminals must respect those laws. But if criminals respected laws, they wouldn’t be criminals.

All across this country, the school curriculum has been invaded by psychological-conditioning programs which not only take up time sorely needed for intellectual development, but also present an emotionalized and anti-intellectual way of responding to the challenges facing every individual and every society.

Are we afraid to face a little spin to protect what others before us have faced death for?

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?

We do not live in the past, but the past in us.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer’s money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.

Now matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

For evidence that private property rather than democracy is the key to prosperity and freedom, I point to India and Hong Kong. In India the electoral franchise is wide and elections have long been regular, but property rights are weak. For most of the post-World War II era, in contrast, Hong Kong had no democracy, but property rights there have been among the strongest the world has ever seen. Indians are poor and shackled by a massively corrupt state; the people of Hong Kong are wealthy and free. Private property, not democracy, is the great guarantor of prosperity and liberty. And because it decentralizes power, it safeguards us from madmen with utopian hallucinations.

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Sometimes it seems as if love songs are being replaced by sex songs.

Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. When some cultures have achieved much greater prosperity, better health, longer life, more advanced technology, more stable government, and greater personal safety than others, has all this been just coincidence?

The scariest thing about politics today is not any particular policy or leaders, but the utter gullibility with which the public accepts notions for which there is not a speck of evidence, such as the benefits of “diversity,” the dangers of “overpopulation,” and innumerable other fashionable dogmas.

What is far more of a threat than the little dictators who are puffed up with their own importance is the willingness of so many others to surrender their freedom and their money in exchange for phrases like “crisis” and “compassion.”

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, that you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

In Washington, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification” when people realize what was said.

Summer Solstice

Because I do not like hot weather, summer is my least favorite season. But there are still things I enjoy about it, and surprisingly, some of them are specific to this sweat-soaked state in which I live. So here are some thoughts on summer’s first day:

I love Independence Day.

I love that there is one time of year when I am able to prefer chilled white wine over room temperature red wine.

I love when evening breezes carry the sweet scent of orange blossoms across Florida.

I love watching swallow-tailed kites, one of my favorite birds of prey, as they soar in the air and seem to stay up there forever without flapping their wings.

I love seeing hummingbirds hover around the blossoms of honeysuckle and aloe.

I love watching fireflies illuminate the woods at dusk.

I love San Diego.

And I love the dramatic pulse of Florida’s afternoon storms, when black clouds darken the sky and spew lighting and thunder and unleash torrents of blinding rain – only to blow away and be replaced by sunny skies in less than an hour.

Flag Day

This being Flag Day, I feel like again re-publishing my post from 2011, which "illustrates" the lyrics to God Bless America using photographs I've taken throughout our country:

God bless America...

Land that I love...

Stand beside her and guide her...

Through the night...

With the light from above...

From the mountains...

To the prairies...

To the oceans white with foam...

God bless America...

My home sweet home...

Note: The final picture was taken by Kelly Noel.

D-Day

75 years ago this morning, human beings from the forces of eight Allied nations laid their lives on the line in ways most of us can hardly fathom. Two-thirds of them were form the U.S., U.K., and Canada.

Traveling in ships and amphibious vessels, they set sail from England in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, bound for the Normandy beaches of Nazi-controlled France. It was the first time since the 1600’s that any invading military had crossed the perilous waters of the English Channel, and as day broke tens of thousands of troops disembarked from their landing crafts and plunged into Hell on Earth.

Slogging first through waves and then through sand, they were sitting ducks for the Nazi gunners positioned on shore. Bullets rained on them amidst a cacophony of explosive reverberations. The men at the fronts of the landing crafts were the first ones to step on the beach, and they stepped onto it knowing they were likely to get shot. Each of them was acutely aware he might be entering the final seconds of his life.

Approximately 10,000 Allied men were killed or wounded that day. However, in bearing that brunt of brutality, those who were first on the scene helped clear the way for 100,000 of their fellow soldiers to reach shore and advance against the enemy, freeing occupied towns as they went. By the end of the month more than 800,000 men had done so, and the war’s momentum had swung in the Allies’ favor. Within a year the Nazis surrendered unconditionally.

In military parlance, the phrase “D-Day” refers to the first day of any operation, but in the public’s mind, it will always refer to the events on the beaches of Normandy. Now the men who braved the bullets on that distant shore are dying away at a rapid rate. Let us give them our thanks while they are still alive to hear it.

After all, we might never have tasted freedom if not for the valor of the soldiers of '44. Because of that, we must resolve to pass their story on to our children, so that they may pass it on to theirs, to preserve what Abraham Lincoln referred to as "the mystic chords" of our nation's memory.

Memorial Day

Today, back porches across America will be filled with the scent of grilled burgers and sight of beer-filled coolers as we gather to celebrate Memorial Day.

In the process, we should remember that Memorial Day is much more than an excuse to get together and toss horseshoes while the kids swim in the pool. It is set aside for the solemn purpose of honoring our servicemen who died while defending America's citizens from armed enemies who sought to drive freedom from our shores.

From the first person who perished on Lexington’s village green in 1775, up to the most recent fatality in the Middle East, the list of the fallen is long. We should never forget that each person on that list made a sacrifice that was ultimate in its finality. We should resolve to do everything in our power to defend America's founding principles against all foes -- domestic in addition to foreign, orators in addition to terrorists -- to ensure that those people did not die in vain.

To observe past Memorial Days, I have published letters that were written by soldiers during wartime. Here they are again.

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This first one was from Sullivan Ballou, a major in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, to his wife. He was killed in the Battle of First Bull Run one week after writing it:

July 14, 1861

Camp Clark, Washington

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days – perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing – perfectly willing – to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield. The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And it is hard for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us.

I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me – perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly I would wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness.

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be near you, in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights…always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

Sullivan Ballou

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This next letter was written by Arnold Rahe, a sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, with instructions that it be delivered to his parents if he did not survive. He was killed in action shortly thereafter:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Strange thing about this letter; if I am alive a month from now you will not receive it, for its coming to you will mean that after my twenty-sixth birthday God has decided I’ve been on earth long enough and He wants me to come up and take the examination for permanent service with Him. It’s hard to write a letter like this; there are a million and one things I want to say; there are so many I ought to say if this is the last letter I ever write to you. I’m telling you that I love you two so very much; not one better than the other but absolutely equally. Some things a man can never thank his parents enough for; they come to be taken for granted through the years; care when you are a child, and countless favors as he grows up. I am recalling now all your prayers, your watchfulness -- all the sacrifices that were made for me when sacrifice was a real thing and not just a word to be used in speeches.

For any and all grief I caused you in this 26 years, I’m most heartily sorry. I know that I can never make up for those little hurts and real wounds, but maybe if God permits me to be with Him above, I can help out there. It’s a funny thing about this mission, but I don’t think I’ll come back alive. Call it an Irishman’s hunch or a pre-sentiment or whatever you will. I believe it is Our Lord and His Blessed Mother giving me a tip to be prepared. In the event that I am killed you can have the consolation of knowing that it was in the “line of duty” to my country. I am saddened because I shall not be with you in your life’s later years, but until we meet I want you to know that I die as I tried to live, the way you taught me. Life has turned out different from the way we planned it, and at 26 I die with many things to live for, but the loss of the few remaining years unlived together is as nothing compared to the eternity to which we go.

As I prepare for this last mission, I am a bit homesick. I have been at other times when I thought of you, when I lost a friend, when I wondered when and how this war would end. But, the whole world is homesick! I have never written like this before, even though I have been through the “valley of the shadows” many times, but this night, Mother and Dad, you are so very close to me and I long so to talk to you. I think of you and of home. America has asked much of our generation, but I am glad to give her all I have because she has given me so much.

Goodnight, dear Mother and Dad. God love you.

Your loving son,

(Bud) Arnold Rahe

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God bless them all, and may they never be forgotten.

Musings on Easter Weekend

There's an old saw that asks, "If you were arrested and put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"

I'm honest enough to admit that the answer would be "No" when it comes to me, but that does not make me an atheist or agnostic. I believe in God not on faith alone but also on evidence (though that's a whole other blog post) and my mind and heart always rev up when Holy Week comes around.

The notion that the universe was created by God (or "a higher power," if you won't say the G word because you're afraid of what the cool people might think) makes intellectual sense and is easy to accept. The story of Jesus as handed down over two millennia? Not so much.

The story of Jesus involves a virgin giving birth to a human baby who is simultaneously human and God, and who later makes a splash around the age of 12 then disappears for 18 years, then reappears as a grown bachelor who preaches radical sermons for three years during which he runs afoul of the Jewish religious establishment and Roman police state, resulting in him being executed atop a hill and his corpse being placed in a cave, only to come back to life three days later and then walk around preaching for another 40 days before rising from the ground and ascending through the clouds to a place he assured everyone was a kingdom.

That does not seem like a tough thing to believe -- it is a tough, perhaps impossible, thing to believe. Yet hundreds of millions believe it all the same, and they are not fools. They are doctors, lawyers, scientists, philosophers, astronauts, and captains of industry, and they know whereof they speak.

Ronald Reagan summed it up best back in 1978, when he was an ex-governor with a radio show who had not yet been elected president. In a letter to a minister who had expressed doubts about the divinity of Jesus, Reagan wrote: A young man whose father is a carpenter grows up working in his father's shop. One day he puts down his tools and walks out of his father's shop. He starts preaching on street corners and in the nearby countryside, walking from place to place, preaching all the while, even though he is not an ordained minister. He never gets farther than an area perhaps 100 miles wide at the most. He does this for three years. Then he is arrested, tried and convicted. There is no court of appeal, so he is executed at age 33 along with two common thieves. Those in charge of his execution roll dice to see who gets his clothing -- the only possessions he has. His family cannot afford a burial place for him so he is interred in a borrowed tomb. End of story? No, this uneducated, property-less young man has, for 2,000 years, had a greater effect on the world than all the rulers, kings, emperors; all the conquerors, generals and admirals, all the scholars, scientists and philosophers who have ever lived -- all of them put together. How do we explain that -- unless He really was what He said He was?

When I was in eighth grade we read Greek mythology in the English Language Arts class taught by Mrs. Ravas, and I noticed how tales of the Trojans and Odysseus and his return to Ithaca were not unlike biblical stories of the Philistines and of Jews returning to Zion from their Babylonian exile. But I also noticed a significant difference, for nobody in 1984-85 was praying to Zeus or testifying that Poseidon rescued them when they got caught in rip currents.

Whereas the Greek gods played dice with people, Jesus, the manifestation of the Hebrew God, sought to deliver them from evil. Belief in Zeus drove people to fear the wrath of his thunderbolts, while belief in the Hebrew God drove them to care for the downtrodden.

Though belief in the Greek gods long ago went extinct, belief in the Hebrew God spread from tiny Judea and went all the way around the world eons before the invention of anything resembling mass media.

In a religious sense, Holy Week, the period from Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday, conveys more vivid images and more acute feelings than any other time of year. It, more than any other succint period of time, links the ancient past to the modern present and makes the former not only obviously relevant, but close enough to touch.

In your mind's eye, picture Jesus entering Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. He was a common man riding a donkey, not an aristocrat riding a horse, yet people exulted his arrival and spread palm fronds in front of him. Hence, Palm Sunday.

Flip to a nighttime several days later and envision the same Jesus praying by moonlight in the Garden of Gethsemane, anguished over the death He knows is at hand. Flip immediately forward on that same night, to the moment when Judas betrays Him in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, identifying Him to the Roman soldiers who place Him under arrest.

Skip forward to the following day, when He appears before Pontius Pilate for trial. Suddenly, many of the people who had praised Him when He entered the city are now calling for Him to be executed by crucifixion, one of the most brutal means of death ever devised by the minds of our "civilized" species.

Given a choice between freeing Jesus or freeing the rioter Barabbus, the mob chooses Barabbus. Pilate confirms Jesus's death sentence after symbolically washing his own hands and declaring that Jesus's fate is the will of the people, not of him personally.

Move forward from there, probably just one day forward, and you see the final stages of what has come to be known as The Passion. You see Jesus forced to walk through the city streets while crowds jeer, carrying the heavy cross to which he is soon to be nailed.

He carries that cross to Golgotha, where it gets laid on the ground and He gets tied to it. Then, nails get hammered through his wrists and feet and the cross is erected with him hanging upon it in what would appear the most helpless and pathetic of positions.

Two other crosses, one on each side of His, are also erected, holding common thieves whose names will quickly be forgotten in the mists of time.

Jesus's mother, Mary, is present for the crucifixion and watches in agony. So too does the enigmatic Mary Magdalene.

But it is possible that none of His disciples were present, for of the four gospels, only one (John) mentions the presence of a disciple and it gives no name. The Gospel of Luke says some of them watched from a distance, but it too gives not a single name. Meanwhile, the gospels of Matthew and Mark make no mention whatsoever of disciples even viewing the crucifixion.

Death by crucifixion came slow and torturously, and usually resulted not from bleeding per se, but from suffocation as the lungs and heart stopped working due to the purge of blood.

At 3:00 in the afternoon, Jesus died and an earthquake rent the area around Jerusalem, tearing in half the veil which separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Second Temple. Death by suffocation while bleeding on a cross would seem to be a defeat -- but the Bible describes it as a victory, and the tearing of the veil represents the ultimate message of Jesus's ministry; namely, that every single person may communicate directly with God rather than being separated from Him and being forced to use rabbis as intermediaries. Hence, Good Friday.

The crucifixion was long but took place all on one day, though we don't know if it was a Friday... Then there was a second day, which in our current observation of Holy Week is a Saturday... Then there was a third day, which in our current observation is Easter Sunday. This is of course the day that Jesus was resurrected, when He rose from the dead and exited the tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimathea, when His divinity was made undeniable to those who were witnesses.

Side note: If you think that dyeing Easter eggs is a modern secularization of the holiday and is meant to separate children from its real meaning, you are incorrect. The giving of eggs to celebrate Easter originated early in the Christian era, in that expanse of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that was then known as Mesopotamia and where you will now find the nations of Iraq and Kuwait. In those early days the eggs were stained with whatever red coloring was available, in memory of the blood shed by Jesus on the cross.

But back to my main point: Holy Week, with its climax on Easter Sunday, is the most goosebump-rippling week on the calendar.

I am the grandson of a preacher man, and Granddaddy gave marathon sermons at sprint speeds, the kind of which Lyle Lovett apparently has some knowledge. Granddaddy was a white man who grew up in Jim Crow North Carolina, but I think he had a bit of black preacher in him and I always wanted to see him and Sherman Hemsley get down together.

Baptists are thought of as stuffy prudes who oppose premarital sex because it might lead to dancing, but Granddaddy was a Baptist and there was freewheeling singin' and dancin' and pulpit-smashin' in the church whenever he hit his groove -- which, unfortunately for those of us who wanted to eat lunch, was every Sunday starting at 11:00 a.m. with the possibility that it might continue past 1:00 p.m.

Where was I? Oh yeah, right. The Holy Week that climaxes with Easter is the most vivid and palpable of all Christian observances.

Granddaddy did vivid and palpable, but he also knew when to suppress his personality and let somebody else hold the baton, and one of my clearest early church memories is from an Easter sunrise service at which he stepped aside.

I think it was so far back that Jimmy Carter was president and I had yet to reach double digits. The sermon was delivered outdoors by George Walters, who then went by Brother George, and it was delivered with a blast of fervent optimism that I still think about every year when Easter draws near.

I have no idea what Brother George said -- remember, I was in single digits -- but I remember the glint in his eye and certainty in his voice like it was yesterday. I still remember exactly how the early sunlight looked over the oaks in Oldsmar, Florida, and how it shined off the sweat on his forehead and how he smiled as he ministered.

Today I am 48 years old, and struggling internally over whether I know how to raise my daughter who is in puberty and my son who likes to manipulate... yet I still remember the feel of that sunrise sermon like it was yesterday, and I would not remember it if it was not divinely inspired.

Though I don't recall the words of that sermon, I do recall its authenticity and the gut knowledge which powered it, the gut knowledge which communicated that God is real and Easter is His biggest, most artful tap on our shoulders -- the tap which lets us know He is here in the now, not far away in the yesterday.

As this weekend unfurls we should open our hearts, appreciate our loved ones, observe the beauty of the world around us, and let ourselves smile.

We tend to worry about life in this broken world, but we shouldn't, because the worry causes us to ignore our blessings.

244 years ago today

The hours from tonight through tomorrow morning mark the 244th anniversary of Paul Revere’s “midnight ride” and the battles that ensued. It is one of the most significant anniversaries in American history -- perhaps the most significant, because it can be argued that if not for the events that took place on April 18th and 19th, 1775, the United States might never have come to be.

Tensions between colonists and the royal rulers from the other side of the Atlantic were running high in those days. Though this was true in all of the colonies that would become our first 13 states, it was especially true in Massachusetts, where the monarchy had effectively shut Boston off from the world by blockading its port and quartering large numbers of soldiers within the city.

It was believed that government forces (officially called "Regulars" and derisively called "redcoats") would invade the colony en masse, so residents in surrounding towns had been stockpiling munitions to defend themselves. The redcoats targeted Lexington and Concord, the former because revolutionaries John Hancock and Samuel Adams were thought to be there, and the latter because it hosted the Provincial Congress and was rumored to have a huge stash of munitions the government wanted to confiscate.

When redcoat forces were detected sneaking from Boston under cover of darkness on April 18th, Paul Revere and William Dawes mounted their horses and galloped into the countryside to warn their fellow citizens. Revere departed from Charlestown, across the Charles River from Boston proper, while Dawes left directly from the city. Revere’s route was the shortest to Lexington and Concord, and thus he was the first to warn their occupants of what was coming.

The next morning, Lexington’s village green was the site of the first skirmish between government forces and the citizen militia known as minutemen. The latter took the worst of it, with eight dead and ten wounded compared to just a single wounded redcoat.

The redcoats then marched on to their primary goal of Concord. After arriving and crossing the North Bridge, nearly half of them went about securing the bridge while the rest searched for weapons. When wooden cannon mounts were found, they were set afire and before long the flames engulfed a church.

Positioned on Punkatasset Hill some 300 yards from the bridge, Concord’s minutemen had been joined by minutemen from neighboring towns, giving them a numerical advantage the redcoats did not anticipate. When they saw the rising smoke, they believed their homes were being destroyed and responded by advancing.

Seeing them approach in such numbers, the redcoats retreated back across the bridge. A shot soon rang out, though no one knows who fired it, and within minutes a full-blown battle had transpired in which half of the officers from the government troops were wounded. Disoriented, they fled back toward Boston and along the way fell under fire from minutemen who had arrived from elsewhere and were hiding behind fences and walls. By the time they made it back to the city, they had sustained more than 200 casualties.

It was an indisputable defeat for the world’s most powerful military, delivered by ordinary people seeking simply to defend themselves against oppression. The example set by those people ignited the fuse of the American Revolution in such a way that it would not be extinguished.

But as with all mass "remembrances" of things that happened long ago, some of the things people assume to be true are not. In the case of Paul Revere's ride, the inaccuracies cut both ways and are of differing levels of importance.

Generations upon generations of American schoolchildren have been told that Revere warned farmers and villagers that "the British are coming!" Those schoolchildren have grown up and passed along that telling to their own kids. In reality, however, what Revere said that night was "the Regulars are coming out." That quote is from his own subsequent account, and from accounts of those he warned. It would never have occurred to him to say "the British are coming!" because he himself was British and so was everyone else in the 13 colonies.

For Revere to have warned people that "the British are coming" would be like me telling my neighbors that state troopers are entering the neighborhood by saying "the Floridians are coming." It would not have made sense. But by keeping the "British are coming" narrative alive for so long, and casually saying that the subsequent Revolutionary War was against "the British," we citizens of the United States have unwittingly distorted something important about our nation's genesis. Specifically, we have abetted a myth which holds that the idea of individual human beings having rights upon which government may not infringe was born on these shores, in the brains of our Founding Fathers. In reality, that idea -- which I fervently believe and which I do indeed "hold to be self-evident" -- was born not in American colonies of the 1700's but in southern England of the 1200's.

A full 558 years before the Boston Tea Party, 560 before Paul Revere's ride, and 561 before the Declaration of Independence, the outline of individual rights that would later serve as the basis for the United States was laid out in the Magna Carta, in the year 1215. Because human nature is human nature and political power abhors a vacuum, the British government infringed on those rights as the centuries passed, but the Magna Carta did not disappear from the British public conscience. In the 1500's an upsurge of interest in that document was kindled; and in the 1600's, Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke argued in favor of the freedom that was enshrined in it.

When our Founding Fathers pushed back against the monarchy of the 1700's, they did not do so with the belief that they were sailing uncharted philosophical waters. They did so because they believed, accurately, that their rights as British citizens had been violated by a British government that was acting counter to British ideals. They considered themselves the true Britons and the rulers from London the false Britons. The notion of a separate American identity decoupled from any British identity probably never entered their minds, yet a separate identity is what came to be. Most Americans living today wrongly believe that a separate identity was part of the plan.

I am not sure exactly how to build the bridge between the inaccuracy I just noted and the one I am about to note, so I won't even attempt to build it. However, the inaccuracy is worth noting and there may be no better time to do it than when talking about Paul Revere's ride, so here I go -- and it is related to, of all things, race.

I am a history buff who grew up in a house where history was frequently discussed, and I always did good in school, always taking advanced classes, so it says something bad about American schools that I never heard of Crispus Attucks or Peter Salem until I was grown. Rather than learn their names when I studied AP American History, I learned them by reading the text of a speech that was given by Duke Ellington in 1941, in which he passionately made the case that black Americans are historically loyal to and historically integral to the United States.

Opining that "although numerically but ten percent of the mammoth chorus that today, with an eye overseas, sings 'America' with fervor and thanksgiving, I say our ten percent is the very heart of the chorus," Ellington mentioned that "America is reminded of the feats of Crispus Attucks, Peter Salem, black armies in the Revolution..." Realizing that those names had been mentioned with the assumption that listeners knew them (in the era of Jim Crow, no less) got me to researching, and I learned things that most Americans would have a hard time believing.

Crispus Attucks was born a slave, circa 1723 in the vicinity of Framingham, Massachusetts, which tells you that slavery was not just a Southern thing. Attucks was the son of a black man and Natick Indian woman, and at some point in his adult life became either a free man or a runaway slave who was not seriously pursued. What is known for sure is that he became a productive rope-maker, seaman, and goods-trader who was known and respected on the Boston docks.

On March 2, 1770, five years before Paul Revere's ride, a fight erupted between redcoats and Boston rope-makers. Three nights later, the dispute escalated when five Bostonians were killed by redcoats in an event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre. Many historians consider the massacre to be the first violent act that started history's train chugging toward the Revolutionary War, and because Attucks was the first colonist to die in the massacre, he -- a biracial man born a slave, hailing from the only two races that have experienced systemic legal racism in America -- is considered by many to be the first fatality of the American Revolution. Today you can visit his final resting place in Beantown's third-oldest cemetery.

Meanwhile, Peter Salem was also born a slave in the vicinity of Framingham. His original slave master, Jeremiah Belknap, at some point sold him to Lawson Buckminster. In 1775, when Salem was believed to be 25 years old, Buckminster granted him freedom and he enlisted in the Continental Army to combat the redcoats.

Salem was literally involved in Paul Revere's ride because he fought as a minuteman during the skirmish in Concord. One week later he enlisted with the 5th Massachusetts Regiment and went on to fight at the famous Battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Stony Point.

One of the colonists' main achievements at Bunker Hill was the killing of British Major John Pitcairn as the battle unfolded. It is known that Salem was one of the soldiers who shot Pitcairn, and generally believed that his shot was the first to strike him. Salem's role was publicly acknowledged as far back as 1786, when a famous painting by John Trumbull depicted him holding a musket as Pitcairn fell. In 1968, that portion of the painting (excluding the image of Pitcairn on the ground) was reproduced as this U.S. postage stamp.

After the war Salem built a cabin near Leicester, Massachusetts, where he lived most of his remaining days subsisting as a gardener and cane-weaver. He was reportedly well-liked by the townspeople and enjoyed regaling children by telling them stories of the war. Upon his death in 1816, he was laid to rest at the Old Burying Ground in his birth town of Framingham. In 1882 Framingham established an annual Peter Salem Day, and the town still observes his birthday each October 1st.

None of which is to deny that slavery was America's Original Sin, or that racial inequality in non-slave areas was American's Original Sin Part 1(b). These historical facts do, however, show that the racial jumble which existed at America's founding was not as cut-and-dry as most people assume. They show that the Revolution was supported by more people than just the rich and "lily white." These things need to be understood and taught in order for future generations to have a true, balanced understanding (and appreciation) of how America got to where it is.

The train of history does not follow an inevitable track. It changes direction over and over again based on the actions and inactions of men and women. If a bunch of ticked-off English property owners had not precipitated the drafting of the Magna Carta in 1215... if later encroachments by the British monarchy had not incited people to hold the Magna Carta dear to their hearts... if the likes of John Locke had not later written clearly about the ideals of liberty that were at its heart... if, later still, Adam Smith had not written about how those ideals apply to economics and lead to mutually beneficial free trade... if the Founding Fathers had not read the likes of Locke and Smith, and not sought to re-assert individual rights against the monarchy's despotic aims... if Crispus Attucks, by being murdered along with four other Bostonians in 1770, had not helped make commoners feel antipathy to the crown... if Paul Revere had not chosen to warn colonists with his midnight ride, so that the colonists could prevent the British Regulars from stealing their arms... if Peter Salem had not been at Bunker Hill to shoot Major Pitcairn and deprive the British military of one of its most creative leaders... if America's early abolitionists were not able to point to heroic actions by the likes of Peter Salem, in order to give some of their uncertain countrymen pause and thereby keep their movement alive... well, who knows what would have happened? Those are a lot of ifs, and every one of them was an important link in a very long chain that eventually led to freedom expanding its reach and slavery being abolished in North America.

Today is a day for reflection on our shared past, and a time for figuring out how we can learn from that past to decide what course we should take in today's extremely dangerous world. We must take pains to ensure that our national memory first gets strengthened, and that it then gets preserved, if we have any hope of being confident and self-assured as we face the future.