While recently driving through CoalvilIe to my son’s flag football game, I had the great displeasure of noticing a sign displayed by the white supremacist group Patriot Front. The sign read: “Strong Families — Strong Nations — Patriot Front.”
While of course I agree that both strong families and a strong nation are worthy objectives, I am writing to vehemently reject the repugnant notion — core to the group’s existence — that skin color, ethnicity or national origin are determining factors in the pursuit of such aspirations.
I am profoundly honored to have spent five years in the U.S. Army, including two years deployed to combat theater in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Many of the brothers and sisters that I served with can be referred to as nothing less than family, due to the incomparable connection that is forged when individuals bond as a team reliant for their very survival upon the patriot marching next to them.
My teams at various times were composed of dedicated men and women from not only across the country, but from around the globe. They consisted of citizens from virtually every U.S. state as well as nationals from the native tribes, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Panama, Serbia, Guam, Samoa, Korea, the Bahamas and more.
We spoke different languages, had varying shades of skin, and came from every background and culture imaginable. Among the ranks were descendants of the Mayflower as well as recent immigrants, believers and atheists, wealthy and homeless, pastors and convicts. Yet despite our differences, we all chose to wear the same uniform and were prepared to risk all for one another and our country.
What overwhelming cause could impel such a body of unique individuals to leave their families, unite with one another and risk blood and life in some foreign desert?
I can’t answer for every team member but I know that for me — and for many — it was an innate commitment to sovereign liberty coupled with an overwhelming gratitude for those who, before my time, offered up their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to give my family the opportunity to live in peace — free to worship, speak and associate as they wish; enabled to pursue happiness as they see fit.
It was a devotion to those God-given inalienable rights which our Constitution protects that gathered us together then, in a conflict to protect free civilization, and it is the same force which today continues to attract people the world over to pursue life here — in one of the freest most flourishing nations to ever exist in the history of mankind.
America’s ethnic diversity is, in and of itself, neither some hallowed virtue nor a loathsome detriment to our society. It is simply a byproduct of freedom — the natural consequence of the virtues which gave birth to the American experiment. Regrettably, mournful transgressions blot our history.
Nevertheless there is no nation so amalgamated from the manifold populations of the globe as is the United States. In spite of our disparities, our noble experiment persists because there is moreover no country whose collective heart swells as greatly with a yearning for freedom and self determination as does ours.
This divine yearning is the hallowed virtue which binds and so long as we the people cherish and preserve this virtue above all else; inane particulars such as ancestry, religion and skin color can — and should — be regarded as trivial.
With this knowledge and affection for the genuine source of national pride, we must recognize that the bigoted pathologies of organizations such as Patriot Front are indeed an affront to true patriotism.
Any family so foolish to believe its strength is attributable to heredity alone is a pathetic lot, for they are forever but one anomaly away from inglorious corruption and fragility.
Likewise, a nation humiliated by such frivolous trivialities as pedigree or tribe is destined to ignoble disintegration.
Such should be the fate of the cabal Patriot Front. In the light of day their strength must be revealed as their pathetic weakness and their shallow petition must be swallowed up by a collective devotion to the divinely appointed laws that inspire a true patriot.
Let them be relegated to the shadows where they belong until they wither away, forgotten and overcome by a nation united not by blood but by the incomparable pursuit of liberty.
Tory Welch
Hoytsville, Vice Chair of Summit County Republican Party