There Are No Good Giants

The following speech was first given by my father, JO Sellars, in 1958. He revised the speech in 1965, updating the population numbers. He served in WWII, stationed in New Guinea during most of his tour of duty, in the Army Air Corps. He loved the USA and upon his return from his service to his country, he vowed to never leave it again. And he never did.

I was approached the other night at the Fairgrounds by a friend who asked me to come here today to talk about the heritage of America. At the time, I thought how incapable I am of talking about the Heritage of America. I have no prophesy to tell you. I am not a seer nor an evangelist. I can neither see the shape of tomorrow in the lay of tea leaves nor read prophetically between the lines of a dream. I am uncertain, as you, thwarted, amazed, evil or good as you . . . or neither good nor evil . . .

The fears I have for this country are your fears. Of want and respect. Of unknown tomorrows. Of hate often taught and intolerance bequeathed and legislated. My needs are your needs. Old needs. Of bread and love. Of work and peace. Of room to grow and time to think and long years to live. But, somewhere in this world, possibly in the space of months or years, one man may finger an electric key which could unlock the vaults of atomic fire which could consume us. We or our children may see that sudden violence. We may have that moment to think: There proud physicist, beauty-enamored poet, miracle credulous priest . . . behold . . . here is the stark embodiment of the millennia of mind. There goes Euclid’s Theorems, Phidias's chiseled curves, the Flood, the Redemption and the Song of Songs. There's the last of Rembrandt, Beethoven, Steinmetz, Plato, Christ being blown along with man and his world. Blown out of context and material time.

Oh, we're a Great Country! And there's nothing quite like us ever existed before. And since we'll never get out of this world alive, we may as well make the best of it . . . IF OUR NATION COULD TALK WITHOUT BEING PROMPTED BY THE POLITICIANS WHO COMPENSATE THE LAZY BY LEVELING THE AMBITIOUS, IT MIGHT SAY THIS: I am the Nation. I was born on July 4, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence is my Birth Certificate. The bloodlines of the world run in my veins because I offered freedom to the oppressed. I am many things to many people. I AM THE NATION.

I am 180,000,000 living souls. The Ghost of Millions that have lived and died for me. I am Nathan Hale and Paul Revere. I stood at Lexington and fired the shot heard around the world. I am Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry. I am John Paul Jones, The Green Mountain Boys and Davey Crockett. I am Lee and Grant and Abe Lincoln. I remember the Alamo, the Maine and Pearl Harbor. When Freedom called, I answered and stayed until it was over, over there. I left my heroic dead in Flanders Field, on the Rock of Corregidor, and on the Bleak slopes of Korea. I am the Brooklyn Bridge, the wheat lands of Kansas and the granite hills of Vermont. I am the coal fields of the Virginians and Pennsylvania, the fertile lands of the west, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Grand Canyon. I am Independence Hall, the Monitor and the Merrimac. I AM BIG. I sprawl from the Atlantic to the Pacific, three million square miles throbbing with industry. I am more than five million farms. I am forest, field, mountain and desert. I am quiet villages and cities that never sleep. You can look at me and see Ben Franklin walking down the streets of Philadelphia with his bread loaf under his arm. You can see Betsy Ross with her needle. You can see the lights of Christmas and hear the strains of Auld Lang Sine as the calendar turns. I am Babe Ruth and the World Series. I am 169,000 schools and colleges and 250,000 churches where my people worship God as they think best. I am a ballot dropped in a box, a roar of a crowd at a stadium, and the voice of a choir in a cathedral. I am an editorial in a newspaper and a letter to a Congressman. I am Eli Whitney and Stephen Foster. I am Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Billy Graham. I am Horace Greeley, Will Rogers and the Wright Brothers. I am George Washington Carver and Jonas Salk. I am Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wally Whitman and Thomas Paine. Yes, I am the Nation. And these are the things that I am.

I was conceived in Freedom and God willing, in Freedom I will spend the rest of my days. May I possess the courage and the strength to keep myself unshackled, to remain a citadel of freedom and a beacon of hope to the world. This is my wish, my prayer, in 1965, one-hundred-eighty-nine years after I was born. This is our American Heritage.

It is a sad commentary nowadays when we tell the truth about our country. Where is our heritage - indeed, where is our liberty. With what poor power I have, I will tell you.

Children of Liberty, your precious heritage lies dying in the streets, hammered by the brutality of a centralized government, ravaged by a Supreme Court that is immune to retributions, and above all, profaned by the complacency of us, her children. This complacency is more dangerous than the dread cancer, more crippling than polio, more disfiguring than leprosy, more fatal than any incurable ailment with which man could be stricken. This Disease of Uncaring, of Unseeing, will be a blot in our blood that no physician, no scientist, can keep us from passing on to our unborn children.

The hour is now. Now while the snarling dogs of tyranny are whining so docilely at our door. Now while men still have the power to cast a vote. Now while the flickering candle of liberty is still freely burning. Now is the hour that someone, perhaps many some ones, must stand up. Liberty is begging you to come and save her. Can't you hear her cries as the door is being closed so gently against our American press? Can't you hear her cries when the thieves representing American labor unions go free? Can't you hear her cries when uniformed guards and US Marshals are on duty in the corridors of American schools? Can't you hear her screaming as she is plundered with changes and misinterpretations and, indeed, sneering disregard for her forbearer, the Constitution of the United States of America? Surely you must see her blood trickling past you when conditions are such that a man planting his own seed in his own ground to feed his own cattle can be put behind bars and hauled into the so-called courts of justice. Where are your eyes? Where are your ears? If Liberty is to be saved, she must be saved by this generation. Possibly she must be saved within this very score of years. Once she is dead and the chains of slavery clank around our ankles, how can we resurrect her?

We are not Gods, we are but Children of God, but the stalwart Children of God must now stand forth! If Freedom were a substance that we could put behind a fence and stand guards about it, America would probably place it on a base of gold and pay ten thousand men to patrol it, but guarding Freedom, sustaining Freedom, is something akin to love. We have to give it away to everyone in order to keep it for ourselves.

Freedom is many things to many people. To many it is a sometime thing. To some it is a word used by politicians when bands play and crowds cheer. To some it is "The Special Privilege." To some it is a sweet responsibility. Let's hope that it is, at least, important enough for us to think about today, at this hour. Frankly it is the only thing worth thinking about. Because without it, everything else is useless. Without it, we cease to be human beings with special sets of desires and hopes and abilities. We become a robot with a button on our foreheads marked "Press Here For Service".

There are enemies everywhere against the Freedom that remains. God knows we have lost much of it. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, I doubt that he intended courts and commissions and boards should usurp the power of a man's individual vote. When the Signers of the Declaration of Independence wrote their name on this document . . . wrote it out for all the world to see . . . sacrificing, knowingly, their fortunes and their lives and their sacred honor . . . it was intended the power to govern remain in the hands of the governed.

If an enemy to your American way of life should appear in that doorway this very instant in the form of one man, there is not one among you but would fight like a demon. Yet, every day, every hour we are wading knee deep in Freedom's Enemies and we are smiling while they take our liberties. Any Why? Because we are too complacent, too eager to adjust to the demands, too unseeing to recognize this very ugly, distorted enemy. So we stand idly by while the thieves of Liberty reach into our minds and steal our individuality.

Today our greatest enemy is conformity. We are all too eager to conform, to be like everybody else. We are told that non-conformity is the root of the maladjusted, neurotic individuals. This, of course, is a chocolate-covered lie, true only to a sick individual whose mind does not function without warped thinking. But non-conformity with any healthy-minded individual is the basis to all progress.

It seems to be important nowadays to "be like the rest". We no longer are men and women with our own inimitable characteristics, but we follow the common herd with common herd instincts. I find it impossible to think of Patrick Henry standing before a group trying to appease and conform. Or Thomas Jefferson, or for that matter Edison, Henry Ford or the Wright Brothers, Colonel Nickerson or Billy Mitchell, and even more recently, Dr. Von Braun who helped us develop our satellite moon. It was disclosed that Hitler once remarked to some of his storm troopers: "Put this crazy man in jail. He wants to go to the moon." It sounded impossible to Dr. Von Braun, but he believed it could be done. He refused to conform. Today (1965), many people believe it can be done. His defiance to conformity has become wisdom.

I am not advocating that we be different for the sake of difference, but we must search our minds, find our convictions and prove them to the world. Thoreau once said, "Do not criticize a man if he is out of step with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, so let him march to the music he hears, however measured or however far away." Today when the funeral dirge of freedom is ringing in our ears, someone must listen for a different drummer. Someone must listen to the strange music of patriotism, long forgotten now in the dusty old file of "isms." Someone must be willing to be called a fanatic, a renegade, a crackpot or whatever a man is called these days who believes in something and is willing to stand up for it. Our Freedom proclaimed by this Declaration of Independence and outlined by our Constitution provides us with the rights to govern ourselves. This is Freedom in its purest form. The strength of our nation lies in our free enterprise system where each person makes his decision for his own fortunes or failures.

Our American way of life was founded on a fundamental belief in God. Before we had a Constitution, we had much dissension among the colonies. You almost had to be an Episcopalian to get along in Virginia, a Catholic to get by in Maryland, a Baptist to live in Rhode Island. Pennsylvania was the only colony that really had freedom of worship. When the colonies first rebelled against the centralized government of England, the first blood shed in the Revolutionary War was that of a Negro and the man who paid the largest share of the cost of that war was a Jew who later died a pauper. When the colonies finally united under a Constitution, it was a God-fearing band of men who realized that freedom of worship would have to be an integral part of that Constitution. In the First Ten Amendments, which we call the Bill of Rights, we gained all the freedoms we enjoy today. That Bill of Rights still stands as first written. However, its inherent aims are being given new definitions contrary to the consent of the governed.

Some periods of history have made men great. Some could have been virtual dictators. In America, we have proven that there are few, if any, good giants. That the little man is just as important as he has always been. The Declaration of Independence we made against the English cried out for the little voice to be heard in the laws made for him to serve and the laws made to serve him.

The early American's protest against the English is best summarized in a lengthy poem entitled "The White Cliffs of Dover". A portion of this poem deals with a letter written by a staunch American to his daughter who had strayed to England and had fallen in love with an Englishman. The old man's love of country is shown as his daughter reads:

"My father wrote me a letter, my father, scholarly, indolent, strong,
teaching Greek better than high school students repay,
teaching Greek in the winter but all summer long
sailing a yawl in Narragansett Bay.
So, Susan, my dear, the letter began,
you've fallen in love with an Englishman.
Well, they're a manly, attractive lot
if you happen to like them, which I do not.
I'm a Yankee through and through
and I don't like them or the things they do.
Whenever it comes to a knockdown fight
with us, they were wrong and we were right.
If you don't believe me, cast your mind
back over history and what do you find?
They certainly had no justification
for that maddening plan to impose taxation
without any form of representation.
Your man may be all that a man should be,
only don't bring him back to me
saying he can't get decent tea.
He could have got his tea all right
in Boston Harbor a certain night
when your great-great grandmother, also a Sue,
shook enough tea from her husband's shoe
to supply their house for a week or two.
How could we help but come to grips
with a nation that stopped and searched our ships
and took up our seamen for no other reason
except that they needed crews that season.
I can get angry still at the tale of their letting
the Alabama sail and Palmerson being
insolent to Lincoln and Seward over the Trent.
All very long ago you'll say
but whenever I drive up Boston way,
I drive through Concord, that neck of the woods
where once the embattled farmers stood
and I think of Revere and the old south steeple
and I say, by heck, we're the only people
who licked them, not only once but twice,
never forget it, that's my advice.
They have their points, they're loyal and brave,
loyal and sure, as sure as the grave;
they make other nations seem pale and flighty
but they do think England is God Almighty
and you must remind them now and then
that other nations breed other men.
From all of which you'll think me rather,
unjust, I am Your Devoted Father."

I like to think that this country was made for all the little nobody people like this old scholar; people who got in the way of everyone else all over the world and who, if there had never been an America, would have died without glory or hope, without food or weapons in their hands, without a hearing or a trial, without medicine or their God, without a last sacrament, for whom there was no marble chiseled or copper hammered to their tortured images.

Any yet . . . and yet . . . let's look at America today (1965). It may not be the best we can make it, but let's look at it as a matter of comparison. We have only 6% of the world's land and only 7% of the world's population, yet we own 85% of the world's automobiles. In fact, we have a car for every 3 persons, while by comparison, comrades of Khrushchev have a car for every 12 . . . hundred. We have 50% of the world's radios, 48% of the world's hospital beds, 34% of the world's edible meats and over 50% of the world's school enrollment. And for the fastidious, here's an astounding statistic . . . we have 92% of the world's bathtubs. How's that for cleaning up on the rest of the world? With only 6% of the land area and 7% of the people, we have amassed 45% of the world's wealth. In Russia, it takes 98 hours for a worker to earn enough money to buy a pair of shoes. In England today it takes 15 hours of work to buy that same pair of shoes. In America it takes less than 7 hours. We have raised our living standard to where life expectancy is now over 70 years. One hundred years ago, life expectancy was 40 years. Think of it, you have a chance to live twice as long as your great-great grandparents. Even in the depths of our worst depression, our standard of living was better than most countries at their best.

We do not claim our system as perfect and we are criticized from many sides. For instance, some members of Congress have provided legislation to appropriate to schools, or students of certain categories. This sounds wonderful on the surface. They're going to GIVE you something! Great! Hooray for me and to heck with you! But where does the money come from? The government does not give anything that it has not taken away first! When any governmental body spends money in any section or segment of our life, it soon becomes a ruling head of that part of our lives. The more we are given, the more we are ruled. Is it wisdom when the government takes from us then spends some 15 to 20% of it in the paperwork it takes to give it back? This take-away, give-away system soon becomes a Giant. And God help us if we ever get a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Stalin in the courts of our land. The power-mad have ways of reaching out and marking the ballot of the unsuspecting individual. Their weapons vary . . . it could be gold or a gun, a minority group of lobbyists . . . the force is still there. The force could be of steel or an editorial . . . tribal, economic force. The persuasion of bread as irresistible as a knife held to the throat, of dialectics as convincing as God or an atom bomb. Once more the historic slogans, the familiar names that have bloodied man's record. The strong reach out in all directions.

O BELIEVE THIS . . . THERE ARE FEW GOOD GIANTS!

Correct the fables, revise the children's nursery rhymes and tell them, the young and the not so young, that it is wrong even for the good to be too strong. The overly strong become despotic! Despots create wars! There may be a few of you in this group who have seen men die for their country. It's not a pretty sight! Some of us know that they do not die in adagio movement, poised heroically to register their finest emotions for a national look, for the grand close up. If you've ever seen an original enshrined . . . unposed and without make-up, you'll see fear or resignation, bewilderment or shock. What is their reward? It is enough that years later "the quarrelsome old" meet in Washington and vote a vast, splendid residential tomb? This is not a pretty picture altogether. In some ways we progress materially. In some ways we grow weaker with wisdom. But one freedom left to us today is the freedom to seek the truth and the freedom to speak that truth. As long as we are in truth, we are in liberty. When the Master of Men trod the earth, he said, "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free." The dictators of his day nailed him to a cross. But the truth he brought has overturned every throne, up-rooted every dictator of His time. The cycles of truth are long but they roll down the centuries with certainty and power. We may be very sure that if America abandons liberty to follow the swamp lights of fascism or collectivism or socialism out into the bogs of communism, future generations of America must climb slowly and painfully out of that foul morass to fight again and to die again to regain liberties which this generation so thoughtlessly tossed away.

The truth shall make you free! Free! Not rich!

Freedom was the promise. Since that promise was made, the centuries have come and gone, economic tides have risen and fallen, but humanity has never ceased its struggle to be FREE. Autocrats have enslaved men, dictators have regimented them, tyrants have ground them down, but 1800 years after that old promise, there was set up in America a government based upon the dignity and inviolability of the individual soul, declaring that all men have God-given, inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the 150 years since that happy event, this America, your America, released from tyranny, watered by individual liberty revivified by the initiative of millions of free men working in their own way for themselves and their children, has produced more human happiness and has made greater progress in art, science, education and economic prosperity than in all the previous centuries of experimentation with the absolute state put together.

BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM!

The shouting and the tumult dies.
The Captain and the Kings depart.
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice.
A humble and contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget.

Where will we be, we children of freedom, if the candle of liberty burns out? What kind of darkness will envelop us as we blunder about among other slaves, unable to get our hands about the despotic few who put us there? Who, then, when the world of men has forgotten the individual light of man, will be able to make it shine again?

Truly, there are no good giants!