☕️ INDEPENDENCE DAY ☙ Tuesday, July 4th, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Don't be like the New York Times! Be patriotic and enjoy your heritage today. An optimistic (but realistic) Independence Day message for everyone.

Good morning, C&C, and Happy Independence Day! Today I have a special holiday edition — especially if you are feeling a little under-patriotic. Let me put some figurative Neosporin on that for you.

Note: C&C will be closed tomorrow since I’ll be up late messing around with fireworks tonight. I might eke out a short post, but don’t count on it.

🗞💬 *WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION* 💬🗞

🇺🇸 The Childers family will celebrate today in our sleepy beach getaway town, where on the July 2020, as all the city’s official celebrations were shuttered for covid, and the locals were advising everyone to stay home “for safety,” a faithful remnant of unbowed, fearless, patriotic citizens delivered hours of the most incredible and moving 4th of July fireworks display I have ever seen, up and down miles and miles of beach front. The glorious reflections off the darkened night ocean were breathtaking.

So.

🇺🇸 But first, let’s deal with the unpatriotic elephant in the room. We’re all sensing it. The New York Times featured this cheerful 4th-of-July story on its home page yesterday:

First, what’s most odd about that headline is that a democrat Administration has been installed and corporate media isn’t allowed to criticize the culture right now. So I wondered where the story was going, but it turned out to be a false alarm; if you drill down into the article, all you will find is a lot of meaningless, woke jibber jabber, expressed from the lips of interviewees who sound like they were made up by ChatGPT.

For example, Malaya Tapp, 18, is skipping the celebrations today because Grifters United, I mean Black Lives Matter, taught the young lady to feel unpatriotic. Plus firecrackers make her nervous. Malaya wanted to visit an indian reservation instead, but the trip got canceled after a ‘covid outbreak.’ Or at least that’s what they told her.

Marissa Vivori, 29, won’t join in because she feels bad for animals that get nervous during the fireworks, plus it’s just too darned hot. She doesn’t sweat well. She also remembers how last summer Roe v. Wade was overturned, and that makes her really mad, so she’s punishing the country by refusing to be happy today. Marissa made admittedly ironic alternative plans to visit London, from whom her native country is celebrating gaining its independence.

Allison Bartella, 30, is sitting it out because Fourth of July food is always lukewarm and not very tasty, and climate change has made it painfully hot outside, not to mention people always toss random fireworks around, which jangles her nerves. To tell the truth, the whole thing never lives up to Allison’s high expectations anyway. This year, explained the Times, you will find Allison drowning her holiday sorrows at a bar on the Lower East Side.

It’s not so much that these rootless folks are so profoundly disconnected from their own culture that they consider celebrating its founding as just another optional federal holiday, with fireworks. The article recites a depressing list of shallow, vapid reasons expressed by a bunch of shallow, vapid people allegedly interviewed by a shallow, vapid New York Times reporter.

Ever wonder how reporters find these “random” people to interview for these kinds of articles? Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. Whatever you think, it’s worse than that.

Nobody wants to imitate these drifting, shiftless, cultureless interviewees who’ve allowed themselves to be robbed of any history or meaning and unplugged from anyplace they can call home. They don’t love the country they live in, and they have no plans of moving anywhere else either. They live in a foggy, ambiguous, uncommitting in-between dimension, not belonging to their culture but also not not-belonging, either.

I’m not setting up a straw man. The truth is, even some conservatives are probably feeling very ambivalent about the holiday, except for more legitimate and profound reasons. Those reasons might have been well expressed by former President Ronald Reagan:

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

It DOES seem like America is becoming a hissing and a byword these days, doesn’t it? And it seems like God has withdrawn his blessings from our Nation. Thanks, Joe Biden!

Reagan’s sentiment wasn’t novel. The very same warning was stated differently by our very first President and Revolutionary War Hero George Washington:

“[T]he propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”

Too bad they never told old George about the separation of Church and state. Anyway, our nation is surely disregarding Heaven’s eternal rules of order and right these days. Take one look at our Monkeypox coordinator if you don’t believe me. Never mind John Podesta’s pizza obsession. So, we shouldn’t expect any propitious smiles from Heaven.

The bottom line is the country is floundering, often badly. So what do we make of it all?

🇺🇸 America is as much of an idea as it is a place. You don’t belong to a patch of dirt, this is just where we made our stand. We belong to a set of ideals, starting with the ideal that all men are created equal.

The Founders rejected the feudalism of Europe and Asia and the tribalism of Africa and South America, preferring instead an egalitarian ethic flowing like a river of life from a Holy God. And so we fought a bloody, expensive war of independence to establish that new system, a new system man’s history had never before seen, a system insisting citizens can govern themselves and only with the consent of their peers: no citizen, no matter how well born, has an inherent right to power.

It didn’t stop there. America took that Biblically-egalitarian ideal and, in under 200 years, spread it to the entire world. Before that, for the entirety of human history, lives were counted in weights and measures. The life of a king was always considered infinitely more valuable than the lives of 10,000 serfs, and human lives were ordered along a value spectrum of inherent characteristics.

Before America, the notion that an uneducated serving girl was “created equal to” her landed master was nonsense, poppycock, rubbish, religious claptrap. But now, post-America, no serious person anywhere in the world would publicly argue against that proposition of radical equality. Neither will anyone argue that AMERICA was the force that changed the world in this way.

For that, the world owes America a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. And that’s even before getting into more current events, like helping save the world from slavery in 1864, from fascism in 1945, and from communism in 1988. America paid a dear cost for its irreplaceable efforts on all those fronts.

🇺🇸 “But Jeff,” you rightly insist, “America has lost her way and is now abusing her blessings to bully the world into becoming a social experiment Petri dish. Not to mention turning the world into a literal Petri dish with its Gain of Function research, and not to mention inflicting Britney Griner on everybody.”

Painfully true, every single word of it, and more. But now we must talk about the faithful remnant.

Don’t give up the ship.

🔥 In “American Colonies: The Settling of North America,” historian Alan Taylor estimated that during the Revolutionary War, up to 30% of Americans remained British loyalists, including most of the powerful élites in big cities like Boston and New York who were the feudal system’s primary beneficiaries. They didn’t want any new-fangled, self-ruling government.

Another third were independents, tilting back and forth with the tides of fate, leaning whichever direction seemed most promising to them in the moment.

The remaining third were the real revolutionaries, the Americans who committed their lives and sacred honors to the cause of freedom, justice, and equality among men. Against all odds, that faithful third changed the world. And at times, their prospects looked incredibly bleak.

You know the story. When then-General George Washington led his daring attack across the Delaware River on December 25, 1776, the Continental Army’s chances were unimaginably poor. As it was then known, the Battle of Trenton started after a series of awful defeats and stinging setbacks for the ragtag American forces, which created a string of humiliating retreats and a profoundly destructive loss of morale.

At that point in the war, the well-equipped British army had won a successive series of significant victories and effectively hounded the Continental Army completely out of New York City. American supplies, ammunition, and funding were scarce, leaving many hapless troops literally barefoot. Critically, many American soldiers’ enlistment contracts expired at the end of the year, and the ice-cold recruits were counting the minutes till they could head home, if not outright deserting to depart early, leaving Washington with a rapidly shrinking force of mostly demoralized fighters.

It was probably Washington’s last chance. The American army was desperately in need of a significant victory to boost morale and quench further desertions. The attack on Trenton was a calculated risk that Washington took trying turn the tide and rebuild confidence in the Continental Army.

Against all predictions, under miraculous circumstances including a sudden and unexpected concealing blanket of fog, ingenuity, and dogged determination, the successful surprise attack on the Hessian forces stationed at Trenton on that Christmas night delivered a badly-needed morale boost and turned the tide for the American cause. The Battle of Trenton boosted support for the war and inspired further enlistments, finally proving that the American forces were capable of possibly winning against the most powerful, well-funded, and well-equipped army in the World.

It would be a grave disservice to the American freedom fighters of 1776 for us to abandon today’s celebration just because the odds seem equally against us now. We are a nation of underdogs! Today we literally celebrate bad odds, of being an outnumbered, outgunned remnant that looks likely to lose.

🇺🇸 I will now wade for a moment into incredibly controversial waters. In its most optimistic, promising, and encouraging passages, the Bible often refers to the ultimate triumph of the faithful remnant.

As an evangelical Christian, I am keenly aware that even mentioning the Bible’s commands to support Israel often irritate our secular C&Cers who don’t view the jews as a particularly helpful group. To be honest, they see lots of evidence that Jewish people are closely involved with insidious efforts to destabilize the world, and they think Christians’ apparently blind support for the controversial middle eastern country is absolutely bonkers.

But here’s something interesting to consider: the Bible itself might be the most anti-semitic text in history, even the parts the jews agree with. The Bible calls the jews prostitutes (in much less flattering terms), faithless pagans and sorcerers, and accuses Israel of making an unholy pact with Satan. And that is just in the Old Testament — the jews’ own sacred text.

At the Bible’s climactic moment, at the End of the World, it promises that God will squish two-thirds of the jews into jelly, leaving only a faithful remnant, the one-third who most kept to God’s commands for Israel to be kept holy and apart, a blessing to the world rather than a curse.

Then — along with any other person willing to follow His lead — God delivers that oppressed, ignored, powerless Jewish remnant. And so once again, we see the now familiar calculus, the triumph of the underdog, the miraculous, inconceivable victory of the faithful third of people who never gave up, and who won out against all odds. That final victory transforms the world. From Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.

🇺🇸 The point is, if these days you are feeling like an oppressed underdog, like the odds of success are insurmountably poor, that your own countrymen have deserted you, then remember the remnant of General Washington’s army that squished the Hessians into jelly and won the Battle of Trenton. Remember that only a faithful remnant is required to miraculously reverse the odds and claim an impossible victory, an unimaginable success that goes on to change the world for the better forever.

As America has done, over and over.

Be of good cheer! Especially on this Independence Day, when we celebrate victories against all odds, triumph in the face of all fear, success in the moment of all doubt. It is our heritage and our birthright, and however tarnished it might look right now, the American story is far from finished.

Happy Independence Day! I love you guys.

PS — please be cautious with those professional-grade fireworks. Margaritas and explosives don’t mix. No trips to the urgent care center today.

Remember, C&C will be closed tomorrow in late observance of our patriotic holiday. See you on Thursday morning to catch up on all the crazy news, like how they just evacuated the White House after suddenly and unexpectedly discovering a giant bag of cocaine on the premises. I am not making that up. Meet you back here then.

Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

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