Fight, Fight, Fight: The America I Want For My Kids
Recently, President Donald Trump made the headlines by working behind the counter at a Pennsylvania McDonalds, handling the fryer, and working the drive-through with genuine warmth, kindness, and love for the everyday people who make up America. Much has been said about the President’s sanity or lack thereof, but all I could think of was, This is my America. The America I want my kids to grow up in. The America I have been afraid for some time that we could lose forever.
I connect this wholesome and completely adorable scene with another wholesome and (somewhat) adorable incident a couple of weeks ago, when President Biden was kidding around with an old fella and put on the red MAGA hat, on a lark. It made me smile; two old farts shooting the breeze about getting old.
And then it made me sad. Because I’m not young anymore but I’m not an old woman either, and I remember a time when politics were not as bitterly polarizing as they are today. And that funny incident with the hat reminded me of a time in the not-so-distant past when our political opponents were just that, opponents. Not enemies to be destroyed or existential threats to our mythical democracy, but our fellow Americans, with whom we have many political differences but share our common love for our great country.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Trump back in 2016. I didn’t know his policies or how he would govern, and my candidate was Dr. Ben Carson. I had just become a mother of two little boys, and I was very concerned about the leader of the country in which they were going to grow up. Thus, I voted third party, prayed, and declared plainly as I always do in election seasons that I seek a country whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11).
I was indifferent to Trump in 2020. I had too much on my mind as a single mother trying to keep two little boys alive, safe, fed, entertained, and nurtured to give two hoots about the swirling political discourse. I liked to joke that I was the only person in America who did not care one way or the other about the most polarizing political figure of my lifetime.
All of that changed on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when God’s hand intervened to spare President Trump’s life from a madman who would take it from him.
In that moment when your life is in danger and you have missed death by the narrowest of margins and the most miraculous of divine interventions, who and what you are made of at the very core of your being is made manifest. There is no time to “prepare a face to meet the faces you will meet.” It’s just you, stripped down to your core.
Most of us in Trump’s shoes, or rather knocked out of his shoes, would not have done what he did. Instead of worrying about his own safety and his own pain and shock, his first thought was to let the people know that he was okay. As the Secret Service covered him with their own bodies, risking their lives to protect his, he stood up above them, raised his fist in the air against the backdrop of the American flag, and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.” His stance, defiant in the face of death, was an echo of the brave young patriot John Paul Jones who, upon being invited to surrender to the British Navy during the American War for Independence, responded “I have not yet begun to fight.”
I think every generation has an image in their mind of their childhood’s Mr. President. Mine was a very noble picture of George Bush Sr. on the cover of a Highlights magazine when I was a kid. I’m too young to remember Reagan although I wish I could, and I inherited a love-hate regard for Carter from my parents. And the image my children will carry all their lives of their Mr. President is the image of Trump standing tall against the American flag, blood running down, fist raised. They ask me about it rather often. And that image symbolizes the fighting spirit of all America, the spirit that fights not against our political opponents, but against the forces of evil that are tirelessly trying to destroy our freedom.
I am too young to remember the assassination attempt on President Reagan; that took place a year before I was born. I did inherit the trauma and grief of my parent’s generation who lived through the assassination of John Kennedy. Thus, the July 13th attempt was the first assassination attempt in my lifetime.
The America that tries to jail, silence, disenfranchise, and kill my President is not the America I grew up in, nor is it the America I want my children to grow up in. In my America, we settle our differences like gentlemen, following the example of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.
I jest, I jest. We settle our differences at the ballot box like Americans. If we let ourselves fall prey to the demonic influences trying to drive our votes and our actions by fear, we are going to create an America that is incalculably worse than an America with Donald Trump as our president, and we are going to find out just too late how precious what we had really was.
I hope and pray we don’t lose our precious constitutional republic. But I think we have to be scared badly enough that we could lose it. Because then we will, indeed, Fight, fight, fight.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Thank you for this. Excellent post!
Wrongspeak should, in an effort at transparency, change its name to MAGAspeak, or Echochamberspeak, or perhaps Blinderspeak. It might be contrarian to publish an article which acknowledges, and condemns, the anti-constitutional (yes fascist) messaging of Trump. One can still disagree with the Democrats AND speak out against lies, racism, violent rhetoric, the crimes of Jan. 6, American Oligarchy, bullying from political pulpits, and the economic power of a viable middle class. Does Wrongspeak have the nerve?