Michael Bray

Author of A Time To Kill

Laying Down Your Life for Your Country

9 May, 2017

We Americans, generally, have held it out to our children, traditionally our young men, to be noble citizens, willing to defend the nation. Indeed, we have honored our fallen almost without equivocation.  Who can speak evil of one who gives up his life for another?  We still suffer a national embarrassment from the Viet Nam era protests when this national tradition was violated by a generation of post-depression, prosperous, “baby-boomers.”

“Spoiled hippies didn’t want to go off to war and interrupt their dope-smoking and sex pursuits,” was the assessment of some critics.  And less tolerantly: “Sissy, anti-American, hedonistic brats!” we said, many of us, under our breath – or otherwise.

Pacifism aside, the virtue of self-sacrifice is indisputably honorable in the case where one’s life is given for the sake of another. And the giving of one’s life for one who is not known or not particularly beloved is an especially awesome act of love.

So it is when a soldier dies for countrymen whom he does not know.  We heap paeans upon him for such beneficence at the highest cost.

And yet the admonition of our pacifist countrymen comes to mind especially when we consider the prospect of fighting on the wrong side of a war or in a war that has no business being fought at all. What is the honor or justice in choosing to comply with the call into a misguided or completely unjust war?

Or if a government is Lawless (denying the Law of God and the God who gives Law as the basis for justice) and is advancing its hegemony into the world, what duty do its citizens have to participate in its wars? What does patriotism mean in such a situation?

Each person is responsible for his own soul. He must conduct himself in a manner that pleases, above all, his Maker.  He must put that duty above that which he owes to his family or his country.  He must say “No!” to unjust wars.

I am prompted with these thoughts by no particular conflict at the present time nor any apparent in the offing. It is our government’s absolute lack of foundation for Law which causes such consternation. In the name of “democracy” – the rule by “the people” rather than Law – we have cut ourselves off from Law.  We imagine we are protected from mob rule by a Constitution.  But that Rule has been co-opted by a gang of “Justices” who “interpret” the Rule like a band of rabbis counting angels on a pin head.  These oligarchs, unhinged from any Rule and driven by the faddish doctrines of the time, “interpret” what they now call a “living document” to suit their whims.

Hence: 1) a right to abort a baby (1973),  2) a right to commit sodomy (2003), 3) national deference to the bestowal of matrimonial honors and sanctity upon sodomite “couples” throughout the fruited plain!  The laws of all the states, The People, were canceled by a band of “justices.”

Whence came these new rulers and wither go we with such tyrants?

The rulings or divinations of these whom we treat as if they were prophets of God Almighty – these apostates who reject His very Law for our land – we treat as if their paltry “opinions” (indeed!) were handed down by Moses!  And as time and trends blow them along, these disgusting divinations become “settled law”! And newer “settled law” is free like sand in the wind to cover older “settled law.”

It becomes difficult, indeed, to urge one’s son to die for such a country. And that, in fact, is why countries become vulnerable inwardly and outwardly.

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