As we get ready to celebrate Memorial Day, let's not forget it's a holiday to honor the brave men and women who serve our country and preserve our liberty, especially the ones who fought during the Civil War to ensure that these states remained UNITED. Today, I am a born-again American, and this is why . . .
I just read an eloquent and moving column by Norman Lear, of All in the Family fame and one of the founders of People for the American Way.
In 1980 I had what I look back on now as a born-again-as-an-American moment. I heard a TV evangelical ask his viewers to pray for the ''removal'' of a member of the Supreme Court, and it shook me to my core.
What I did as a result was to produce a 60-second public-service announcement, take it to South Bend, Ind., show it to Father Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame, secure his approval and ask him for the names of other mainline church leaders who might join his endorsement. It was a handful of such leaders, along with the late Texas Congressman Barbara Jordan, who joined in what became People for the American Way.
The title came from the PSA, in which a blue-collar worker says that ''No one, not even a preacher, can tell us we're good Christians or bad ones depending on our political points of view . . . That's not the American way.''
So what is the American Way? And how did we wander so far and lose our way? As more and more revelations surface about the wilderness into which our country was taken (can we even be debating the use of torture? can we even be discussing secession?), how will we find our way back? So many questions, and no clear answers. But questioning is a start, and Norman Lear has some thought-provoking ones here.
No one, not even a preacher or a politician can tell us the answers. It's up to us.
Happy Memorial Day.