bierkergaard

I learned something very interesting during the presentation by the Park Ranger at the Memorial Day Service in Valley Forge Park. She told of the deprivation of the soldiers in food and drink during the winter encampment at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. The Continental Army was literally dying of dehydration and starvation. Soldiers would go around the camp screeching like crows, "No Meat" as kind of a macabre joke and cry. Then, the statements got even more dire, "No bread, no soldier." Mass desertion, what the English were counting on as they were comfortably camped in Philadelphia, became more and more a real risk. The British were counterfeiting the American currency, the Continental, which was not backed by silver or gold. So, an already fledgling monetary system was further damaged by British currency sabotage. The Continental became so devalued, that providers of goods and services would not always accept it as payment. There was a derisive ins...

2nd Cor 3:17 "Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." With the recent Arizona law aimed at using the police to investigate citizenship, it easy to forget that we are all immigrants. My take is that we have to lessen the complexity of gaining citizenship and also enforce our borders. We have to lower the legitimate wall of immigration and make the illegitimate wall higher. In our days of rapidly fading prosperity, many Americans would be completely fine with our sealing of the borders against all immigration. We would deny to others what our own descendants were offered: a chance to improve their lives through opportunity. This is wrong. That Americans are now looking to Europe for inspiration, just shows how serious our failure at self-government has become. It is as if we are hopping in the philosophical boat back to our ancestors' former lands. The American ethos has always been historically one of "can-do." Much of...

Psalm 107:5 "Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. " I spent yesterday morning in Valley Forge National Park walking and memorializing the Revolutionary War soldiers. It was really hot. I felt bad for the Park Ranger who was wearing full-length wool pants and a hat that looked like it would breathe as much as garbage can lid. She was red with heat. I know more about the encampment in Valley Forge than most because I grew up close to Valley Forge Park and have taken a personal interest in it since my first visit about 40 years ago...a day not unlike yesterday in that it was at the end of the school year and it was hot. I was the new kid, recently moved from West Virginia, and I didn't know anyone. I remember not having much of a good time. Despite the popular lore, about the winter encampment in Valley Forge in 1777 -1778 being brutally cold, the winter was relatively mild. What killed most of the soldiers was disease, 2500 in all, and the deadliest month was May...