Missouri Education Watchdog: Independence Day Thoughts

Missouri Education Watchdog: Independence Day Thoughts:

Independence Day Thoughts

by Anngie

The oppressive heat may quell much of our Independence Day activities this year, but it gives us more time to reflect on the meaning of this holiday.  The wave of government intrusion into our individual lives is now close enough that many of us on the beach front can recognize it for the destructive tsunami that it is. Just like those waves, it is both broad and tall in scope, hitting us across a vast expanse of our everyday lives. It will be no less destructive in its slow steady overwhelming of everything in its path.

A child born into our country now is more likely to grow up believing that they are weak and incapable of achieving the adulthood many of us have known. The story of Julia is said to be their future. They will believe they come from cruel and greedy stock because their school will only teach about the impact of European invasion on the native peoples of the Americas when they learn  about the founding of this country.  If they learn about the religious persecution of the Puritans at all, it will be an abstract discussion.  They will have limited ability to understand a people who were desperate to escape a king and country, whose clergy had been bought by the monarchy, who therefore ruled virtually every aspect of the Puritans' lives.

Though the Puritans had been taught to read and were quite capable of doing it, they were forbidden by law from