Christmas, 1777

I understand that times are tough with unemployment rising and the economy shaky at best, but things were a lot worse for our ancestors this time of the year at a place in Pennsylvania called VI understand that times are tough with unemployment rising and the economy shaky at best, but things were a lot worse for our ancestors this time of the year at a place in Pennsylvania called Valley Forge..

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We complain that prices of food are too high; the men encamped on a frozen plain in 1777 would have been more than content to have any food at all beyond the meager rations that barely kept them alive. Most were without shoes, their bleeding feet wrapped in rags. Their tattered uniforms provided little warmth against the bitterly cold winds that blew across the frozen plain. If ever a cause looked hopeless, theirs appeared lost. They were facing the best trained and well-equipped army on the face of the earth. Viewed from our perspective a couple of hundred years later, their situation was hopeless. Yet they endured, and we owe them the freedom we enjoy today. Moreover, we owe them every ounce of the resistance they would have expected us to bring to bear against a Federal government bound and determined to limit our God-given liberties by drowning us in a sea of regulations. One wonders if they had foreseen the extent to which their descendents would allow a distant government in Washington to impinge on their individual freedoms would they have not thrown up their frozen hands and surrendered to the soldiers of the Queen. Thank God they didn’t. They became His willing instruments in the creation of what Abraham Lincoln would later describe as “a government by the people and for the people,” and they endured their awful privations on behalf of the generations of Americans who became their heirs and enjoy the liberties they won for us at such great cost. I urge you my fellow Americans to get and read “Valley Forge” (St. Martin’s Press) Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen’s ’s fine novel about those fellow Americans who starved and died in large numbers so that those who came after them could enjoy that new birth of freedom under God. Let it be an encouragement for those of us determined to withstand the continued efforts by the White House and their subservient minions in the Congress to rob us of the liberties they suffered in that frozen winter at Valley Forge. Let us recall the words of Benjamin Franklin “They that sacrifice liberty for safety’s sake deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Faugh ‘a Ballagh!