From: An Average American

First and foremost, thank you. Whether you realize it or not right now, the vast majority of the American people support you and your mission.

Sure, there have been criticisms of choices made and tactics deployed by your command echelon, but you have carried out the mission given with distinction and honor. Your fallen brethren have not died in vain because their last full measure of devotion was made for the eternal cause of freedom; a freedom for us that erupted from the bosoms of our founders over 200 years ago, but has been in the hearts and minds of ordinary people all over the world since time began. It may seem sometimes that the only real mission is to protect the backside of the person next to you, but you are doing so much more.

The best people yearn for freedom not just for themselves, but for all around them. You are truly the best of the best. Our enemies yearn to control and dominate by quashing the universal desire of every human being to be free. They use the most heinous and inhumane tactics that would shock even the worst barbarian. Their unwitting allies in our country, in their blind hatred for our President, have lost sight of the universal values that give them the right to question the very authority they hate. The saddest commentary on their dissent is that it is they who will be the first on the chopping block should we lose this epic battle between good and evil. In their zeal for political superiority they have lost sight of the fact that the liberal causes they have fought for will be the first to be rescinded under the regimes envisioned by our enemies. However, freedom is still available to even the dimmest of us all. These misguided souls believe that withdrawal will bring evil to a halt, but in their stupor to acquire power over our hearts and minds they have underestimated the perils of unchecked evil and have failed to acknowledge the power of unbridled good. Freedom has been this country’s number one export and will continue to be despite what these misguided souls espouse.

As we remember your fallen brethren and the great people who preceded them in other fights for freedom please think of that new baby just born somewhere in the world, think of their children, think of their grandchildren and know that the cause to which you have devoted your life, fortune, and sacred honor to is just, righteous, and historic.

Always remember on this Memorial Day that the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army, and Coast Guard are the prow of the ship, the tip of the sword, the leading edge, the boots on the ground, and the guiding beacon of freedom. You are the hope that freedom rides upon and we are eternally grateful to you for your commitment to the human dignity that can only be guaranteed by quashing the very evil that you face today.

Sincerely,

An Average American

In case it slipped by you, the Democrats have shown whose side they are on by embracing opportunities to meet with Syria and other terrorist states while soundly rejecting opportunities to meet with President Bush to discuss how to support our troops.  See Chronicle.

It was once said:

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Orator - 106-43 B.C.

Teddy Roosevelt said, “The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer”.

Nancy Pelosi and her ilk who have embraced the enemy in the guise of loving their country have forgotten that leadership in time of peril needs inspiration and perspiration in the fight for what is right. Perhaps they need to take the queue from past leaders and thinkers.

"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph." - Thomas Paine, The Crisis - December, 1776

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. " - John Stuart Mill, English philosopher

"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills: we shall never surrender" - Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister - speech in the House of Commons, 4 June 1940

I am sure that we all feel the same way today that Ike did 63 years ago when he spoke of the capabilities of our troops and the righteousness of our cause when he said:  “I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!" - Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower - June 6, 1944

The saddest part of this story is that the first infidels to face the ax will be the very constituency Pelosi represents. Do they really think our enemies will tolerate liberalism for a moment if we lose?

The recent attention to the matter of Morse v. Fredericks (Bong Hits for Jesus) in the U.S. Supreme Court is a perfect opportunity for a learning experience for us all. This case goes to the fundamental core of our existence as a nation; freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.

We take the Bill of Rights for granted, but not many of us know that there was opposition to these hallowed addendums to the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton opposed the entire concept of a bill of rights by arguing, in Federalist Paper No. 84, that the absence of power of the government to regulate the rights of citizens in the constitution was enough. Hamilton believed that, under the constitution,

"[the] people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations. ‘WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ORDAIN and ESTABLISH this Constitution for the United States of America.’ Here is a better recognition of popular rights, than volumes of those aphorisms which make the principal figure in several of our State bills of rights, and which would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government."

Hamilton believed that such a “grant” of rights by the government implied by its very nature that the conduct protected could be regulated through interpretation of the scope of those same granted rights. What could be truer today as our brethren use the courts to compel us to exercise these rights in prescribed and confusing ways?

Our founders envisioned a people that could use reason to fulfill the dream of enlightened self-government. Enlightened self-government requires us all to ask as we exercise our rights; what should I do, not simply what can I do. In sum, the ethics Hamilton refers to should temper our rights in ways that make them meaningful and sustainable. Without ethics we quickly erode to speech that is baseless and destructive.

In recent years, people have pushed the extremes of conduct and speech and use the Bill of Rights as an excuse for their conduct. They wear their extremism as a badge of honor declaring their allegiance to the god of expression. What they are really doing though is giving the rest of us more reason to use government to control their conduct and to regulate our God-given rights, just as Hamilton feared. In other words, our collective sense of ethics questions the efficacy of allowing such extreme views and conduct to exist. The coercive powers of the courts are sometimes used to compel the rest of us to accept and protect conduct we abhor or to prevent us from doing or saying things we believe are right. This litigation always ends in more restrictions, not more liberation, because ethics becomes the prisoner of jurisprudence.

What Morse v. Fredericks boils down to is whether there is a difference between “free” speech and “cheap” speech and whether schools can protect decorum by limiting cheap speech by its students. One can quibble with the details, but this is the core issue. Schools can either be a haven for ethics or a haven for cheap speech. With that in mind, what exactly is wrong with teaching and enforcing ethics and decorum in our schools?

The most important message in this case that should concern us all is that we may have lost sight of the responsibility to self-regulate speech. The point is that “Bong Hits for Jesus” is cheap speech, not free speech, and the student who proffered it should have had the decency to not unfurl his ignorance in front of a school during a parade.

I never want to get to a time when government regulates our thoughts and speech, but the only way to avoid that in the long-term is if we self-regulate our rights with the use of ethics versus legal niceties. Otherwise, the marketplace of ideas will head straight into bankruptcy and ultimate receivership by our courts.