1775 and Today -- "A cry of defiance and not of fear"

 

To the Editor:

"Listen, my children, and you shall hear,

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; 

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.”

You might know these lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Ride of Paul Revere.”  This April 18th and 19th is the 250th Anniversary of this event in American history. Some are about to do a lot of remembering of this famous day and year. Celebrations will abound. Favorite beverages from the past, rum, beer and cider will be consumed. Reenactors will suit up and march in as straight a line as possible around Lexington Green and Concord, Massachusetts. President Trump in his usual hollow tones will call it a “very beautiful day.”

Revere’s midnight ride preceded the bloodshed at these sites. Here the Red Coats did battle with determined, organized and trained colonial Americans. This was the start of the American Revolution. Colonists living on the edge of a vast ocean far from the seats of power in England, the King and Parliament, chose to oppose with arms British policies they saw as oppressive. 

Soon after blood was shed in 1775, John Adams, who was not a man of violence,  visited the scene.  He called Lexington-Concord  the “Rubicon crossed” and devoted himself to the Revolution. Thomas Paine, pennyless, not yet the famous pamphleteer, had only recently arrived in Pennsylvania where he heard the news. He recalled these days as the moment he rejected “the Pharaoh of England forever” and went on to write "Common Sense" in 1776 advocating American independence from the British.

No one knows who fired the first shot on Lexington Green. But on July 4,1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson correctly called it “the shot heard round the world.”

 Few today know Longfellow was an abolitionist. He was passionate in his anti-slavery commitment.  Slavery was a moral evil and in 1842 he published a book,  “Poems on Slavery.”   

When Longfellow's poem "The Ride of Paul Revere" was first published Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president, South Carolina had already seceded from the union, the war with the slave South was imminent.  A second American revolution was about to become a reality.  Another Rubicon was about to be crossed. First published in 1861 Longfellow’s Paul Revere poem is about more than the events of Lexington-Concord.

And it has meanings even beyond the time of its appearance in 1861, when the nation was on the cusp of Civil War. Great poetry is not time bound. This is the concluding stanza of the  “The Ride of Paul Revere.”  

"A cry of defiance and not of fear,

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

And a word that shall echo forevermore!

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

Through all our history, to the last,

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,

The people will waken and listen to hear

The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

And the midnight message of Paul Revere."

Can you feel a "night-wind" an "hour of darkness and peril" with us today?  

We live in a time when the norms of the law are being by-passed. Career lawyers in the Justice Department are forced out or made to do the bidding of a power hungry President. The denial of standard funding to necessary programs serving the people is used as a tool of political retribution. Pardons for convicted insurrectionists flow out of the oval office while innocent citizens are denied due process, sent to jails in foreign countries. And everywhere in government personal loyalty replaces professional experience and competence in appointments to high office.   

250 years have passed since the people stood up to the powers of the Crown. Do the continuing demonstrations across the nation indicate "The people will awaken and listen to hear" as they did in the past with "A cry of defiance and not of fear"?  Will the “hurrying hoof-beats” carrying another “midnight message” reach its destination in the halls of Congress, in state legislatures, in the elections of 2026 and 2028?  

Gary Daily

"God made us do it" --Trumper's desperation rationalization

 

Readers’ Forum

Terre Haute Tribune Star, April 12, 2025

“Votes, laws make those kinds of judgments”

There is little reason to try to reason with Lois Little (Trib-Star, March 26, 2025). It is her personal faith not reason she calls on in criticizing me for attempting to do God’s work. Of course, that’s her God she has in mind. And having God on her side, in the sights of her being, she finds it easy to see only blindness in others not so gifted.

Ms. Little does have the acuity to see the real Donald Trump. She correctly states he is (her words) an “arrogant, egotistical man.” Still, it seems her personal God made the voters put this deeply flawed, convicted criminal in the White House.

Coming down from the heavens, like Ms. Little, I am just a voter with a single, important vote. I work hard to use this limited power carefully, in my community, state and nation. I have to wonder what Ms. Little, Christian Nationalists, and Sunday only MAGA Bible readers think of John F. Kennedy’s take on God’s hand at work in our elections and government. As JFK put it: “… let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

And now we see Donald Trump’s grinding arrogance and vaulting egotism at work in the oval office. Should we be surprised or silent when we see wisdom replaced by loyalty, objective advice replaced by flattery, competence pushed aside for craven churlishness, and the public interest abandoned, replaced by private, moneyed interest?

The Founding Fathers did not establish an other worldly guide as to what our individual political views and actions should be. No elected official gets a free ride, a ride that only God can judge. Our votes and the laws under our Constitution make those kinds of judgments.

And we all suffer the results of the 2024 election.

— Gary Daily Terre Haute