Today is the 79th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France during World War 2. We’re very close to losing our last living links to that historic event.
About 77,000 US troops participated in D-Day. Around three thousand of them were killed, about one in every twenty-five. Thousands more would die in the days and weeks afterwards. Overall, about 420,000 servicemen died to defeat Japan and Nazi Germany.
You’ve all seen "Saving Private Ryan," and it’s a great film, but there’s something misleading about it. When "Saving Private Ryan came out," Tom Hanks was 42 years old. Edward Burns was 30. Tom Sizemore was 37. Vin Diesel was 31. Even Matt Damon, the youngest brother of the Ryan family, the man they’re trying to rescue, was 28. Everybody in that film was old.
The average age of a US army soldier in 1944? 26. Most of the men who actually landed at D-Day were teenagers, or in their early 20s. They were substantially younger than I am.
Those people were brave. Actually brave: People who had to go to a far-off country they knew nothing about, to risk death or being gruesomely maimed in a hellish environment for the sake of their country.
79 years have passed since then. So what gets considered “brave” today? Basically the exact opposite of bravery.
Today, we have California State Senator Scott Wiener celebrating a drag queen as brave for… putting on drag shows.
For being brave enough to mock Christianity, which elites mock all the time.
For being brave enough to put on a dress and dance for children, with the full backing of the California and federal governments, and the media, and every major institution in the country, and the knowledge that if anybody pushes back they are the ones who will be doxed and fired from their jobs and humiliated.
We’re told that this is bravery. It’s not. It’s propaganda.
What were the D-Day soldiers fighting for? If you asked them, they’d probably have said they were fighting for the American way of life: Our Constitution and its freedoms. They might have said they were fighting for Christian civilization against the forces that wanted to annihilate it.
Most of those soldiers are fortunate enough not to be around anymore. If they were, would they even see the country they fought for in the country of today? What’s actually left of it?
Today’s America gives public honors to drag queens who publicly humiliate the religion that more than 90 percent of World War 2 servicemen believed in. Today’s America would consider WW2 servicemen to be unfathomable bigots for the views they held, the laws they supported, or the heroes they admired.
How did we get here? Well, we have to reflect that a lot of it is the creation of the world we made after World War 2.
Some of it was good: We won so decisively that this country had barely any threats to it, other than the economically backwards Soviet Union, and once they collapsed we had no serious threats at all. So we could backslide morally and culturally without getting immediately punished for it.
We’ve been able to fund half a century of reckless spending and economically ruinous social engineering because we were so militarily powerful that we can get the entire world to buy our debt.
It’s like that meme on the Internet goes: Hard Times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.
Well, maybe now we tweak it: Hard Times create D-Day veterans, D-Day veterans create good times, good times create drag queens, drag queens create hard times.
