I'm studying the Revolutionary War this year. I have lots of books I want to read, I finished 1776 and am getting through John Adams rather quickly. Some thoughts I have from what I've read so far:

-Maybe it's just David McCullough, the author, but over and over he mentions instances that in one way or another appear to be directed by God. I can't tell you how many times he tells a story from the Revolutionary War that indicates the Americans received help from above.

Example) (This is when the troops were retreating off Long Island). "Though nearly morning, a large part of the army still waited to embark, and without the curtain of night to conceal them, their escape was doomed.

Incredibly, yet again, circumstances--fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often--intervened. Just at daybreak a heavy fog settled in over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the night. It was a fog so thick, remembered a soldier, that one "could scarecely discern a man at six yards distance." Even with the sun up, the fog remained as dense as ever, while over on the New York side of the river there was no fog at all."

It's so faith-strengthening reading about the beginnings of our country. America really is such an amazing story.

Another observation I've had, mostly from reading John Adams, and now watching the HBO series "John Adams," is that our rights are God-given, not government-given. In the tv series, John Dickinson is trying to persuade Congress to give an olive branch to Great Britain and that by appeasing the crown America would receive back its rights. Adams persistently argues that Great Britain created the separation when it tried to take away American's rights and that rights are not given to us from the government, but from God. We especially see this happening today where the government is claiming to be the giver of rights. This is very dangerous, I'm sure Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin are rolling in their graves seeing the government trying to assert itself as the giver of rights. The Constitution was established to protect the people from the government. By the way, Washington was amazing! What do you think about Washington Beck? Or Adams Washington Beck?

Unedited thoughts, No proof reading or spell check

Actually I think that's how most blogs are.

Yesterday after the Rwanda video I chatted with Carrie a little about the video and I asked her how she liked Hotel Rwanda. They said they really liked it and what not and then I asked her what she was going to do about it? Or what's she going to do about the Congo, where 5.4 million have died in the last 10 years? What's she going to do about Sudan, or Uganda? But really, what can we actually do?

I think one big thing we can do is give our time and money to causes we believe in. There are some really good organizations out there like HELP International. That's why I went with to Uganda last year and it changed my life. Ya know, I really think trying to feel the pains of others really helps you. We live in a very competitive self-serving world. It really is hard to feel the plight of others when there's so many external forces convincing you to focus on yourself. It's kind of funny, I've been really trying to reconcile my desire to help others and conservatism. Here's the thing, there are sterotypical conservatives out there (such as my hero, Rush Limbaugh) who are portrayed in the media as selfish, rich individuals who don't care about the poor. I think this is a media thing, jealous of Rush's power to convince and argue conservatism. I really can't stand the media, I think I almost hate the media. It's not just the liberal media news sources, but I'm talking about this Hollywood culture of distorting good, moral, American values. It's kind of hard for me to put my finger on it, but in the media's eyes, America is the worst country in the world. They try to distort our history and do stories on everything bad we do. I agree that there are flaws and things we've done and do that are embarrassing, but what about all the good we do? Why is it that these stories are always on the last page of the newspaper? Well, sex, violence, and dispute sell, that's unfortunate. What was one of the main reasons al-Qaeda attacked us? They don't want our culture to infect their culture. What do they think our culture is? They think Western values are what Hollywood and the media portrays. There's so much truth to this, ask girls that have been to the Middle East if they were ever frisked. A lot of times they are, ya know why? Because they think all American girls are like the Hollywood girls. Gosh, it really bothers me. Before my mission Glenn Beck did something on how much he can't stand Hollywood and then told a story of a woman in Russia who was trying to get a hold of al-Qaeda and convince them to not do attacks on DC, but on Hollywood. Beck was being funny about this so he polled his listeners and asked them, "What should we do about this? Give her the chair, stone her, lock her away for 15 years, or pat her on the back and say, hey, I think you're on to something?" He then went off and said that we should sell Hollywood and San Francisco to China and that we would even build gold walls around the cities to please everyone there. That was funny. Let's see, where was I going with this? Well, the point is, is that America is the greatest, most selfless nation in the world's history. Proof? Did we ask for any land when we liberated Europe? Only enough land to bury our dead. Did we take over Japan's resources and impose our way of life on them? No, we wrote them a constitution, yes, but we gave them democracy and helped them build up their economy. America is the most giving country in the world, as far as dollars, time, and blood.

Ok, so back to that reconciliation thing I was talking about. The media and liberals tell us conservatives that we don't care about the poor. Completely false, in fact the opposite can be made. What's the best example of taking liberalism to the extreme? Communist Russia. Not the best example of the goodness of socialism when the end result is the death of millions citizens, mostly the poor. My point is not to rag on liberalism, but to defend conservatism, helping people help themselves is the best way to go. That is conservatism.

I'm taking a poli sci capstone class which requires us to do a big research project on a topic. Here's what I'm researching: The socialization of violence, and specifically corporal punishment in the classroom, contributes to political violence. In Uganda we did the teacher training thing where we talked to teachers about why they shouldn't beat students and such. I've been wanting to start a NGO and focus on this teacher training aspect of it because teachers really believe that beating students is the only way to disciplnie them. What I'm trying to do with my project is link this socialization of violence with political violence. Hopefully it'll be really convincing and then I can use it in my NGO.

Anyway, I'm really just thinking and writing right now. Kind of disconnected thoughts, but that's the way I think sometimes. I just really want to help people, I want to go back to Uganda. I want to see the world, and see how other people live. One person can change the world, one person at a time, one idea at a time. Baby steps. The motivations have to be in the right place, and sometimes I struggle with that, I think everyone does. It's just part of who we are, but I think that's part of the coming to Christ process and submitting your will to His. It's just tough figuring out what His will for you actually is...I hope to find it soon hopefully and then do it 110%.

Long live the United States of America!

I've said a lot recently about how ticked off I am at Americans for turning towards socialism and supporting the immoral Clintons. Ya know, I love living in America where we have the freedom so we can discuss things like this. There have been major crackdowns recently in Pakistan, Iran, Myanmar, and Venezuela against people speaking out against the government. With the caucuses and primaries coming up I've thought a lot about American values. I'm not dedicated to a candidate, I'm dedicated to American values and will vote for who embraces those values.

This speech was given recently, it is amazing! I moved around some parts of the speech, but ya gotta read this, it gives me goosebumps:

Upon first meeting Washington, Lafayette told him: "I have come here to learn, not to teach." It was this new spirit and youth of the Old World seeking out the wisdom of the New World that opened a new era for all of humanity.

From the very beginning, the American dream meant putting into practice the dreams of the Old World.

From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person.

America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who—with their hands, their intelligence and their heart—built the greatest nation in the world: "Come, and everything will be given to you." She said: "Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent." America embodies this extraordinary ability to grant each and every person a second chance.

Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That's what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it. And she fought for this freedom whenever she felt it to be threatened somewhere in the world. It was by watching America grow that men and women understood that freedom was possible.

What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The men and women of my generation heard their grandparents talk about how in 1917, America saved France at a time when it had reached the final limits of its strength, which it had exhausted in the most absurd and bloodiest of wars.

The men and women of my generation heard their parents talk about how in 1944, America returned to free Europe from the horrifying tyranny that threatened to enslave it.

Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole.

------Break--------
K, now I'm going to continue because he says a lot more awesome things, but can you guess who gave this speech? It's election season so...a presidential candidate? Republican probably, right? Maybe Pres. Bush? Maybe a leader in the Senate or House of Representatives?

NOPE! This was given by President Sarkozy, the President of France! This guy loves America more that many Americans love America. Recently I've heard stories of a professor giving students extra credit if they burned the flag. In a movie, Tommy Lee Jones, put up the flag upside down. I heard of a teacher who changed the words of "America, the Beautiful" to "America, the Terrible."

------He continues---------

Ladies and Gentlemen,
The men and women of my generation remember the Marshall Plan that allowed their fathers to rebuild a devastated Europe. They remember the Cold War, during which America again stood as the bulwark of the Free World against the threat of new tyranny.

I remember the Berlin crisis and Kennedy who unhesitatingly risked engaging the United States in the most destructive of wars so that Europe could preserve the freedom for which the American people had already sacrificed so much. No one has the right to forget. Forgetting, for a person of my generation, would be tantamount to self-denial.

What was so extraordinary for us was that through her literature, her cinema and her music, America always seemed to emerge from adversity even greater and stronger; that instead of causing America to doubt herself, such ordeals only strengthened her belief in her values.
What makes America strong is the strength of this ideal that is shared by all Americans and by all those who love her because they love freedom.

America's strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and moral strength. No one expressed this better than a black pastor who asked just one thing of America: that she be true to the ideal in whose name he—the grandson of a slave—felt so deeply American. His name was Martin Luther King. He made America a universal role model.
The world still remembers his words—words of love, dignity and justice. America heard those words and America changed. And the men and women who had doubted America because they no longer recognized her began loving her again.

On September 11, 2001, all of France—petrified with horror—rallied to the side of the American people. The front-page headline of one of our major dailies read: "We are all American." And on that day, when you were mourning for so many dead, never had America appeared to us as so great, so dignified, so strong. The terrorists had thought they would weaken you. They made you greater. The entire world felt admiration for the courage of the American people.
America feels it has the vocation to inspire the world. Because she is the most powerful country in the world. Because, for more than two centuries, she has striven to uphold the ideals of democracy and freedom. Fathers took their sons to the beaches where the young men of America had so heroically landed. They read them the admirable letters of farewell that those 20-year-old soldiers had written to their families before the battle to tell them: "We don't consider ourselves heroes. We want this war to be over. But however much dread we may feel, you can count on us." Before they landed, Eisenhower told them: "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you."
And as they listened to their fathers, watched movies, read history books and the letters of soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Provence, as they visited the cemeteries where the star-spangled banner flies, the children of my generation understood that these young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.

To those 20-year-old heroes who gave us everything, to the families of those who never returned, to the children who mourned fathers they barely got a chance to know, I want to express France's eternal gratitude.

On behalf of my generation, which did not experience war but knows how much it owes to their courage and their sacrifice; on behalf of our children, who must never forget; to all the veterans who are here today and, notably the seven I had the honor to decorate yesterday evening, one of whom, Senator Inouye, belongs to your Congress, I want to express the deep, sincere gratitude of the French people. I want to tell you that whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France. I think of them and I am sad, as one is sad to lose a member of one's family.

In times of difficulty, in times of hardship, America and France have always stood side by side, supported one another, helped one another, fought for each other's freedom.The United States and France remain true to the memory of their common history, true to the blood spilled by their children in common battles. But they are not true merely to the memory of what they accomplished together in the past. They remain true, first and foremost, to the same ideal, the same principles, the same values that have always united them.

It is this ambitious France that I have come to present to you today. A France that comes out to meet America to renew the pact of friendship and the alliance that Washington and Lafayette sealed in Yorktown.

Together let us be worthy of their example, let us be equal to their ambition, let us be true to their memories!

Long live the United States of America!

Vive la France!

Long live French-American friendship!


-----------------End------------

Have you ever read and pondered the words of "America the Beautiful," "God bless America," or "The Star Spangled Banner"?

Man I love this country.

Independence

Another good 4th of July. I'll really miss 4th of July back home. We would barbecue, play baseball, and watch fireworks. The fireworks were cool even though they were far away. We provided our own Patriotic music which was nice. Ya know, I love America! I love our history, what it stands for, what it should stand for, what it is, and everything about it. Going abroad always really makes me miss America and the securities we have here. God bless America. I found some awesome quotes and stories:

There is a legend about the day of our nation's birth in the little hall in Philadelphia, a day on which debate had raged for hours. The men gathered there were honorable men hard-pressed by a king who had flouted the very laws they were willing to obey. Even so, to sign the Declaration of Independence was such an irretrievable act that the walls resounded with the words "reason, the gallows, the headsman's axe," and the issue remained in doubt.

The legend says that at that point a man rose and spoke. He is described as not a young man, but one who had to summon all his energy for an impassioned plea. He cited the grievances that had brought them to this moment and finally, his voice falling, he said, "They may turn every tree into a gallows, every hole into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can never die. To the mechanic in the workshop, they will speak hope; to the slave in the mines, freedom. Sign that parchment. Sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the Bible of the rights of man forever."

He fell back exhausted. The 56 delegates, swept up by his eloquence, rushed forward and signed that document destined to be as immortal as a work of man can be. When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.

It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of ruls for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own exept those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

-Ronald Reagan

(Isn't that a cool story?!! I took a class called Principles of Founding of the American Republic and we discussed those things a lot, how America was the first nation to recognize rights of people. It is our ideology.)


A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.

-Henry Ward Beecher

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
-Samuel Adams

(I've heard through older family members that we're direct descendants of Samuel Adams. I haven't been able to find the line yet, but I believe it. His cousin John Adams is my hero.

"Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
-John Quincy Adams

"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
-Bill Clinton

(Ok, I'm not a Bill Clinton fan, but that is a GOOD quote)

"This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
-Elmer Davis

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
-Abraham Lincoln

A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
-George Santayana

America the Beautiful



America, Sweet America, God shed his grace on thee, and Crown thy good with Brotherhood, From Sea to Shining Sea



I'm excited to come home. I love America.

I feel like I have so much to do when I get back to Provo. I have a few businesses I want to start and either want to start a NGO or get HELP to do a teacher training program. I want to start something that can sponsor kids to go to school in Uganda. I also need to get two computers for organizations in Gulu and one digital camera.

So many things have happened the last two months. It has been one life-chaning adventure after another. Hopefully Provo won't be too boring. But there's a lof of fun things happening- rafting the Snake, camping adventures, family reunions, Zion's National Park, weddings, jet skiing, etc. So yeah, I take it back, Provo won't be boring. There's so much I want and have to do.

This trip has been everything I wanted it to be and more. I feel like it's springboarding me into what and how I want to become.

I'll write about the last couple days later when I'm back. There's so much to write about. I am so physically, spiritually, and emotionally exhausted right now. It's been a mini-mission almost the past couple days. I've visited so many investigators, new members, and members. It's just been a rollercoaster, some people doing really well, some people unfortunetely not doing too well. I feel really helpless for those that aren't doing that well. Sundays were always rough days on the mission because people wouldn't come and stuff....today was a lot like that. Yesterday was so special having family prayer and scripture study with a family I taught...and then watching Spiderman 3 in a slumber party.

Tot ziens Nederland, Mweraba Africa! Hello America!