It was nice seeing the pictures of all my friends' dads honoring their military service on Facebook on Veterans Day. My dad was a Marine. All through his life you could tell it was the most transformative thing he ever did -- a constant source of pride. The values of his generation are lost on the self-absorbed, woke generation of today.
My last uniformed service was Webelos, and I am not sure if I quit or was asked to leave. This makes me value even more the service of our veterans, who fought for freedom and self-reliance. Many made the ultimate sacrifice. They fought to stop this country from turning into exactly what it has now become.
Maybe there is an unseen longing for freedom in America. "Yellowstone," the number-one show on TV, has been outed as having undertones of "conservative" messaging. I guess Kevin Costner now has so much money that he can afford to be outed as right-of-center in Hollywood. The smash TV show has defied Hollywood's predictably woke agenda by appealing to Americans' frontier nature.
What kids know of the frontier West is limited. The National Park Service has allowed hunters to kill about 1,000 buffalo to stem overcrowding. Lefties in big cities were upset. They virtue-signaled by mounting protests demanding that hunters stop killing buffalo and serving their wings at sports bars like Hooters.
In the latest episode of "Yellowstone," character Beth Dutton, the bad-ass daughter of the family patriarch, orders a drink at a Bozeman bar. A man imprudently chooses to hit on her, and she warns him, "This is your last chance to leave me alone with your self-esteem intact." He makes the mistake of asking her to sum him up, and she pegs him perfectly as one of those liberal elites buying places in Montana.
Beth Dutton: "You're a professor somewhere fancy." "Northwestern," he says. She goes on, "You have two grown kids, your wife left you, and you can now bonk the coeds. You decide to move to Bozeman because it is your favorite place to ski, and now you teach a Zoom class from your creekside cabin, lecturing about inequity and concentration of wealth and how they are decimating the middle class. All the while you draw your six-figure salary and finance your dream home with a loan from the university, 275 basis points below the loans your students have to pay to listen to your BS. And you paid over asking price, ran up the housing prices here and screwed the middle-class in two states. You f------ hypocrite ... ."
Her speech sounds like it could be one by Ayn Rand's character Dagny Taggart, from the same region and mindset, in "Atlas Shrugged." They are two truly strong female characters, not the victim character writers write about today.
I was told by Dems that fascism was on the ballot. When I went to vote I did not see it, so I had to write it in.
In fact, with so many folks running for office and the blurring between parties, I am not sure who I voted for. There were so many confusing yard signs for local races that there is a good chance I voted for a Realtor.
By not being true to itself, the GOP lost the important Senate seat held by Republican Pat Toomey to a terrible candidate, Democrat John Fetterman. Like GEICO might say, beating Dr. Oz was so easy that even a caveman could do it.
Veterans Day reminds us of the strength this country once possessed and the values that inspired the heroism of our service members. "Yellowstone" and "Atlas Shrugged" values. Today the left is all about politics and winning.
Biden got confused on Veterans Day. He laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Voter.
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated satirist, author and radio/TV commentator, at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.