Independence Day and Thanksgiving define America

Independence Day and Thanksgiving define America - GLENN K BEATON

• My father’s father – my grandfather – died in the depths of the Great Depression when my father was five. 
• He was the second husband his mother buried. She then single-handedly raised my father, his brother and his half-sister.
• For a few years anyway. My father flunked the sixth grade, twice. He dropped out of school altogether in the eighth grade to go to work to help support the family. Kids grew up early in those days. He joined the army at age 17 just before the war ended, and served in Europe and Japan. He got his GED, and landed a job as an engineering technician...

What he liked about the Fourth of July was that it celebrated a nation he truly loved. 

He was awestruck that he – he! – could achieve what he did. 

His sentiment was not founded in conceit for what he had achieved, but for love of the place that let him do so, a place rooted in the notion that all men were created with equal opportunity regardless of their circumstances or limitations. 

Merit counted for a lot, and effort accounted for even more...

This Independence Day, green shoots are sprouting in America. 

A post-apocalyptic lunar landscape of wokeness, Marxism, hatred and nihilism is giving way to a renewed appreciation and outright love for a country that is still the greatest in history, a country whose best days are still ahead, God willing. 

My father would be happy to see it this Independence Day, as am I.