There seems to be a shortage of good news. Everywhere we look, there is something on the surface that appears to be negative. Of course, this is the "short view" of the news. The long view of the news is just this: Some things change while others remain the same. A whole lot is changing at once.
The Bird Feeder takes the view that many negative looking things are actually blessings in disguise. Maybe you feel the same way. If you do, preen your feathers and gather around the feeder. Hearing us say it, though, does not do it justice. Let's see it in action.
At this link we find the following quote about West point Military Academy:
Randy DeSoto, a West Point alumnus, claimed in The Western Journal that he was one of the “entire Corps of Cadets” that viewed a video of MacArthur’s 1987 speech commemorating the school’s 25th anniversary.
“The general closed by telling the cadets, ‘In the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country,'” DeSoto wrote.
“Hopefully, the same will be true for today’s West Point cadets, even with ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ no longer in the mission statement.”
On the face of it, this sounds bad, doesn't it? Duty, Honor, Country being gone? What is this nation coming to?
However, if you read between the lines, something else emerges. What is immediately apparent is that this is no longer West Point's mission.
The new mission statement is this:
To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation,” he added.
What this shows is potentially this: The army in terms of Westpoint is no longer defining itself by duty . The duty, or oath assumed, is to the United States and its Constitution. Therefore, Westpoint is saying, in essence, it no longer has the mission of being an army in terms of the United States but rather has values that are Army Values--whatever that means. It likewise has service to the Nation, but what Nation is that?
All of this tells us something. It tells us that for those who recognize the military as having at its core documents like the Declaration of Independence that the above institution is no longer identifying as that or deriving authority from it. That makes it "dead or dying". It also makes it a potential dead branch tax payers no longer have a need to support.
So, Westpoint is in its death throes. What will spring up in its place? Might it be an Army that has values that are aligned with the nation and its fundamental principles? There is an exciting possibility here. Some things die so that other, better, more progressive OR conservative things can live.
This is the moral to this story. This, is how The Bird Feeder, sees news. We hope you see it that way too.
