William J. Bennett - The American Patriots Almanac: Daily Readings on America

THE
American Patriots
ALMANAC

OTHER BOOKS BY WILLIAM J. BENNETT

America: The Last Best Hope Volume I

America: The Last Best Hope Volume II

Body Count (with John J. DiIulio and John P. Walters)

The Book of Virtues

The Book of Virtues for Young People

The Broken Hearth

A Century Turns

The Childrens Book of America

The Childrens Book of Faith

The Childrens Book of Heroes

The Childrens Book of Home & Family

The Childrens Book of Virtues

The Childrens Treasury of Virtues

Counting by Race (with Terry Eastland)

The Death of Outrage

The DeValuing of America

The Educated Child (with Chester Finn and John T. E. Cribb)

The Index of Leading Economic Indicators

The Moral Compass

Our Children and Our Country

Our Sacred Honor

The True Saint Nicholas

Why We Fight

THE
American Patriots
ALMANAC

Daily Readings on America

WILLIAM J. BENNETT
AND JOHN T. E. CRIBB

2008, 2010 by William J. Bennett and John T.E. Cribb

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Illustrations: Clint Hansen/Scott Hull Associates

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Page design: Walter Petrie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bennett, William J. (William John), 1943
The American patriots almanac / by William J. Bennett and John Cribb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59555-267-9
ISBN 978-1-59555-260-0 (Revised version)
1. United StatesHistoryAnecdotes. 2. PatriotismUnited StatesHistoryAnecdotes. 3. United StatesBiographyAnecdotes. 4. United StatesHistoryMiscellanea. 5. Almanacs, American. I. Cribb, John T. E. II. Title.
E179.B53 2008
973dc22

2008032262

Printed in the United States of America

10 11 12 13 14 QG 5 4 3 2 1

To the families of the American soldier,

families who, for love of country,

have sacrified in countless ways.

CONTENTS

Flag Etiquette: Guidelines for Displaying
and Handling the U.S. Flag

Americans face daunting challenges in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Millions are out of work. Our national debt is rapidly approaching unsustainable levels. The woeful education of many people raises serious questions about our ability to compete in a global economy. Islamic terrorist groups continue their jihad against the West. Iran, the chief sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, is working to become a nuclear power. Korea is a nuclear power, testing more and more missiles by the month.

Perhaps most alarming, weve suffered an erosion in respect for some bedrock institutions, from the press to Wall Street to the government. A poll released by CNN in 2010 found that a majority of Americans think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses a threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.

Despite these problems and more, the second edition of this book remains optimistic for a simple but profound reason: this is a remarkable country, arguably the most remarkable in history. Its promises and principles are spectacularly hopeful. This does not mean that Americans are better than anyone else in the world, or that all nations should strive to be just like the United States. It does mean that there is something exceptional about the American character, a spirit and outlook that make this country, in Lincolns words, the last best hope of earth.

The idea that America has a special role to play in history has been around since the first European immigrants came to these shores. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, Puritan leader John Winthrop wrote. The eyes of all people are upon us. He was right. For most of this countrys history, the world has watched to see how America struggled to live up to its promises. Sometimes weve fallen short, tragically short. But often we have attained heights long thought unreachable.

What are the ingredients that make up this remarkable, magical mixture that is America?

First of all, liberty. In his farewell address to the nation, Ronald Reagan told the story of John Mooney, a sailor assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Midway in 1982. It was a time when many people in Southeast Asia fled communist oppression by setting sail in small boats, hoping that American naval vessels would pick them up in the South China Sea.

The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, Hello, American sailor! Hello, freedom man!

Thats what it is to be an American. We stand for freedom.

We also stand for equalityequality in opportunity, in basic rights, in human dignity. On the night he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama began his victory speech in Chicago this way: If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. The election of President Obama showed the world, once again, that Americans are determined to achieve Martin Luther King Jr.s dream that every person be judged by the content of his or her characternot skin color, gender, or circumstances of birth.

Americans are by instinct and heritage a democratic folk. There is an old story about Mike Fink, the king of the keelboaters who once floated the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. A man who claimed the lineage of French royalty got into a tangle with Mike, who ended the argument by kicking the Frenchman out of a tavern into a street with the words, What if you are a king? Aint we all kings over here? We Americans believe in the will of the people, and we dont take kindly to a ruling class, whether it be aristocrats or bureaucratic elites.

At the same time, Americans prize individualisman outlook that stresses the moral worth and capabilities of each person, as opposed to systems that put faith in centralized, socialistic control. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up this way of thinking in his essay Self-Reliance:

There is a time in every mans education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.