My husband Bill was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam, where he spent a year fighting communism in brutal conditions. He returned home alive, with only a relatively minor physical wound. Tragically, 58,281 of his fellow Americans did not. Their names are etched into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., which is a solemn reminder of the human cost of that conflict. Whatever your views on the Vietnam War, how America entered it, how it was fought, or whether it was winnable, those who gave their lives believed they were serving an important purpose, which was containing the spread of communism. They paid the ultimate price for that.
It is deeply troubling that, just decades later, politicians openly promoting socialist and communist-inspired policies are not only viable candidates but also are winning elections in America. Even more concerning is that our education system often fails to teach the horrors of communism and socialism. The gulags, the famines, the purges, the economic collapses, and the tens of millions dead under regimes like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and beyond. Instead, too many classrooms romanticize these ideologies while emphasizing America’s flaws.
This selective teaching has consequences. We are witnessing the results in shifting public attitudes, street protests and election outcomes. America is drifting dangerously close to abandoning the principles that made it the most prosperous, free and innovative nation in human history with individual liberty, free enterprise and representative constitutional government.
We owe it to Bill and all the others who served, and especially the fallen, and to future generations to ensure the lessons of the past are not forgotten and that the American experiment does not end through ignorance or ideological surrender. We must be sure to teach our children, and anyone who will listen, about the horrors that are about to be put upon us and stop the spread of those hideous ideologies.
Meg Reynolds
Valencia
