Letters to the editor _ DuPage County

History shows we cannot cut-and-run

To read the newspapers today and listen to Congress trying to pass a law demanding that the "U. S. get out of Iraq now" shows a vast ignorance of American history.

Colleges no longer teach dates, facts, names and terms, and a broad knowledge of history and thinking skills that would interpret today's history.

"Dead white men" are sneered at as irrelevant. Few know of the crushing defeats through which our country has endured and prevailed.

Can the average student tell of the winter of 1776, when George Washington had suffered defeat after defeat, and was without money to pay his sick and shivering soldiers?

Washington was seen praying in the bitter snows of Valley Forge.

Almost no one knows that the Barbary Pirates were making the U.S. pay protection bribes under our first three presidents.

Do they know how these North African pirates were defeated?

Does today's student know of the summer of 1864, when Abraham Lincoln was walking the halls of the White House in depression, with thousands of troops dying in every battle, with antiwar riots occurring in New York City as he feared that the Union would soon be lost?

Do they know of January 1942, when half of the U.S. Navy was on the floor of Pearl Harbor, when we had lost the Philippines, most of New Guinea and were barely holding on to Australia?

Can anyone imagine how history would have been different had our nation "cut and run" in any of these dark days?

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer and others should be shamed by the words of Winston Churchill spoken during the darkest days of World War II: "It is always too soon to give up."

For some in our Congress we can't give up soon enough.

Priscilla Weese