Honoring their sacrifice is more than remembering

Julie Reeder

Publisher

After observing Memorial Day and paying our respects to those who have served our country and given the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, or the freedom of others, we must be spurred to do more. We must be willing to personally pay a price for freedom where we live. It’s no time to be lazy. We can’t be scared or intimidated. We have to do better. I would posit that we are at a crucial crossroads in our country.

We, as individuals and groups, must commit to doing our part. Whether it’s participating in our city council meetings, school board meetings, planning groups, getting out the vote, or just being an informed voter. It’s the best we can offer.

We can’t just put our heads in the sand when it appears our two-tier system of justice is unfairly treating one group over another, such as Republicans vs. Democrats, or the Trump family vs. the Biden family. Or, a whistleblower against Trump vs. whistleblowers against the FBI, or the J6 people who never even entered the capitol getting 18 years in prison vs. rioters who caused billions of dollars burning down cities and killing or injuring dozens of police not being prosecuted at all.

Legally, we can’t elect district attorneys, politicians and judges who allow bands of organized thieves to rob our stores without facing any prosecution. Any thinking person would know that is a recipe for crime-ridden disaster of our businesses, stores, and cultural fabric.

On the world stage, we used to be a shining example - land of the free and the home of the brave. Now the rest of the world is taking notice. Russia has invited 80 nations to join BRICS as the world decides who is going to replace the United States as the world power and shift away from the U.S. dollar. Thirteen countries have formally asked to join BRICS.

At this point I have to ask myself, “Can we blame them?” We are such a mess as a country. We can’t even balance a budget. We just keep printing more money, kicking the can down the road and increasing inflation.

And while Rome is burning, we don’t focus on important issues or important business at hand because we are too busy contemplating our belly buttons. We can’t even decide basic facts like if we are male or female. We’re so self-absorbed that some of our most important topics are whether other people call us by our preferred pronouns. We have to be a laughing stock.

Educationally, we congratulate ourselves locally, when our collective school scores have increased by 3 percentage points but they are still far below average in basic reading and math.

Culturally, we are reverting back to judging people and making decisions based on skin color under the guise of social justice and equity.

With climate change we are willing to upend everything as we know it, hurt our economy, worsen poverty levels and spend trillions of dollars to try and lower the temperature of the planet by ½ of one degree when larger countries like China and India are doing the opposite and playing by different rules.

With immigration, just since this administration took office, we have allowed 7 million people to cross our borders illegally. This is more than the majority of our states (39) have in population individually! That’s an invasion. Think of that. Only about a dozen states have more population than what we have allowed to surge our borders illegally, along with human trafficking, fentanyl, and who knows what else?

Having an informed electorate is crucial to keeping our freedom. Having an informed citizenry is crucial to making important personal health decisions.

How are we informed? We are so divided that we have a view of the world based on which news stations we listen to and which social media platforms we participate in daily. Most of our information is based on our preferred ideologies, rather than factual news reporting and we look down on the “others.”

We can’t allow our critical thinking to be affected by someone else, or a corrupt government agency labeling something as a “conspiracy theory” because most of those in the last few years have been proven to be true. It’s hard when we find out we were wrong, or deceived, but we have to keep being truth seekers and not just followers.

Our social media platforms openly tamper with election, not only by censoring and controlling what information is allowed before elections, as in the Hunter Biden Laptop story, but Facebook spent an additional $400,000,000 supporting only Democrat candidates.

So it’s not surprising that many of our national news stations and social media platforms are biased, based on the station’s ideology or their advertisers. During COVID, millions of dollars were paid to national media from large industries like pharma, which is also the largest or the second largest political lobby. Now we know from the Twitter files that millions of dollars were also paid to platforms like Twitter by the government to censor information that we now know was true.

During the COVID pandemic, proven, inexpensive, safe, and effective drugs and treatments were vilified, like Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma. Or they were just withheld during COVID because it didn’t make anyone money, like the experimental vaccines did and their subsequent medicines.

Doctors, including our local doctors, told me they “self-censored” because they didn’t want to “get in trouble.” The State of California actively persecuted doctors, trying to cause them to lose their license if they prescribed these safe and effective drugs. This is still being litigated in our courts.

Are we going to put up with that?

Regulatory capture is killing the objective service of government agencies like the FDA and the CDC because they are funded by the very industries they are supposed to be regulating for the good of the people. Instead of being objective, they are not only giving biased information out, but they have been caught censoring doctors, scientists, experts, and leaders who have life-saving first hand knowledge and experience.

Individual freedoms were too risky and rules had to be created for the good of the whole. This is such a slippery slope. Our country is based on individual freedom.

Next, we will have to fight back against compelled speech. Free speech will increasingly become “hate speech,” so not only will some things be censored, but we will be told what is acceptable and what we have to say, based on political correctness, not scientific or historical correctness.

In our traditional Judeo Christian culture, Christ is the example of sacrificial love to the point of death. Now He is vilified while tolerance is preached for almost everything else.

It just seems to me that unless we are willing to pull our heads out of the sand and not be bullied or intimidated while we do our civic duty, we waste the lives of all who fought and died before us. Everyone has their job to do and it might be at the local, state or national level. Let us not disrespect those who went before us by allowing bullies to intimidate us and weird ideologies to infect our children.

People might call you names. They might not like you. They might think you are stupid. Yes, that is all true. But they can’t kill you…not yet. Are we so comfortable and fragile that we can’t risk people getting angry at us, especially as we honor those who died?

In the Bible in Matthew 5:44 it says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘Hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.…

So, let’s pray and love those who hate us, but let’s not stop there. Let’s not be intimidated. Let’s speak the truth in love. Let’s not self-censor. Let’s be brave and have courage. There’s much work to do for those of us who are still alive.