February is the month we celebrate President’s Day… a misbegotten creation wherein a Congress, seemingly beholden to the travel industry, designated Washington’s birthday to always fall on the third Monday in the month.  Though a convenient three-day weekend popularly received by the public, somewhere, lost in all the proceedings, was Lincoln’s birthday, a holiday celebrated in only a handful of states.  To celebrate both Presidents, on our February Movie Night at Old City Hall, we are running a 21-minute Warner Brothers tribute to “Honest Abe”… together with one of the best and historically accurate films set in the Revolutionary War, John Ford’s DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK.  Finally, in celebration of our nation’s history, we are showing a cartoon, again from Warner Brothers, in which Porky Pig junior learns from Uncle Sam why he should study American History.  Caution… it is a flag-waving piece.

I write this because in recent months, I seem to have been drawn into conversations with people so upset about real and perceived injustices in our nation’s past they will neither respect nor salute our flag.  As for our armed forces, they regard these as nothing more than instruments of murder.  I remember my surprise when one such person admonished me for using the word “hero” in describing General George Patton (whose outfit I was in at the conclusion of World War 2).   This same woman reacted to the Blue Angels flying over the Ashland 4th of July parade by cursing the pilots with the *f* word.  I wonder what the late, great character actor Charles Durning would have said to her.  When he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, he wound up being the only survivor in his outfit.

Earlier, I’d had the experience of being chastised by a couple who objected when I used the phrase “the good old days” while announcing a forthcoming  Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry double-header at Old City Hall.  They proclaimed our past to be nothing more than a time when women were slaves… and we used genocide against the American Indians… and we embraced slavery as a nation… and the list went on.

I was foolish enough to try to answer them by pointing out the actions others took to correct these wrongs. But this didn’t seem to matter.  Instead of celebrating any progress made over the years, they deplore the past in its entirety, divorcing themselves from all that went before while comfortable in their own assurance of what is right and proper.  This kind of foolishness tears at the very fabric of our country and our identity as a people.

Of course it doesn’t help when MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry proclaims her “footnote for the Fourth of July” by stating, “The land on which

[the Founders] formed the Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class.

“This is the imperfect fabric of our nation. . . It’s ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery.”

What a way to celebrate July 4th!  A prisoner of the past, she is a slave to it.  But what is so grossly wrong in this picture is that history is filled with men and women who fought to correct injustices, to solve their problems and then moved on… something today’s detractors seem unable to do.

They would do better to follow the advice I once read… remembering that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there… so accept your past without regret, handle your present with confidence and face your future without fear!”

This is what farmers in the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York did during the early days of the Revolution.  Their story is still celebrated each year in the village of Mohawk in Herkimer County on July 4th.  Mohawk is almost exactly the size of Jacksonville with a population of 2710 people.  John Ford recreates their history in a film with on-location color photography so magnificent that it competed with GONE WITH THE WIND for the Oscar that year.  This is your invitation to come celebrate our history, and our President’s Day, at Old City Hall on Friday, February 15th at 7 PM.

You can even bring a flag to wave.