Posted on 10/20/2017 2:37:37 AM PDT by markomalley
The day after Christmas LIFE Today will feature an interview country music legend Charlie Daniels. The Stream‘s Nancy Flory was able to grab a few minutes with Charlie before the taping to chat about the topics of the day.
It means that I’ve lived almost 81 years of my life in a country that’s free. It symbolizes the land that I love that so much blood has been shed for. That it’s the best country in the world and that it’s still worth fighting for.
I know the players say it’s not against the veterans and it’s not against the military but it’s been perceived that way by the military. The person out there, the man or woman that’s standing out there on the field holding that flag is very possibly a combat veteran that has gone to war for this country, and in a minute and a half of a football game people can’t show them or the flag respect?
I have no problem with the demonstrating, with the disagreeing with social wrong and all that, but there’s places to do it and places not to do it. People have spent a lot of money for football tickets. And they don’t pay to see players do what they’re doing.
I really don’t know — if the owners aren’t going to take a hand, I don’t think there is a solution. Guys are working, there’s a certain decorum that they should practice in my way of thinking. There are times to demonstrate and times not to demonstrate.
If I went on stage and my whole band knelt down before we played the National Anthem, which I do sometimes, we wouldn’t have any fans left at the end of the night. You know, and even if I wanted to, it’s the farthest thing from my mind, I couldn’t do it. It’d kill my career.
So that’s the chance that they’re taking. Football has been my favorite sport for a long time and it bothers me to see the ticket sales falling and the TV ratings falling and it’s a shame. And it’s all because of the situation.
I really don’t know. I have come to find out I seem to know very little about the world anymore. It’s a different world than what I grew up in. I used to be able to gauge people, especially when it came to patriotic things — but I really can’t anymore. There is a contingency of people out there who are very, very upset about it. And they’re proving it with their pocketbooks.
There may be veterans that it doesn’t bother, but I happen to know an awful lot that it does bother and they take it very much to heart. And that’s the part that bothers me.
There again, I have no idea. I’m surprised it’s gone as far as it has. There has been so much of our history that has been destroyed by people who disagree with it for one reason or another. I know in, places in Rome, that a lot of the pieces of art that was art that the Catholic Church basically disagreed with and they desecrated some of it, some of it they got rid of. It was a piece of history. None of us are pagans, but it’s kind of the same thing to me. You may disagree with something, but you can’t just go destroy every symbol of it.
Look at how we feel about Christmas. People are trying to destroy the symbol of Christmas … trying to [get rid of] everything that has to do with Jesus or God at Christmastime. They don’t even want you to say “Merry Christmas.” That’s an out-shooting of this very situation we’re talking about, political correctness gone nuts.
It’s what they’re doing, as far as destroying statues. Christopher Columbus was one of the greatest men ever born. He put up with an awful lot to get here and find this country. And what is it against him? Why are we so against him?
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, those guys were heroes. They did things I didn’t like, certainly slavery is wrong. I totally disagree with it. I think it should never have happened. And it never should’ve kept going as long as it did. But there would be no nation to have slavery or not have slavery had it been for men like this. They saved this nation, so I think they deserve some credit for it. I don’t think their statues need to be desecrated.
If that’s the law, then everybody should abide by the law. A law’s nothing but a suggestion if it’s not enforced. I mean, why even have laws if we’re going to let people walk across the border?
There’s a reason for that border being there. We’re going to watch people walk across the border, we might as well not have a border. If we’re going to let our people decide which laws they’re going to abide by and which laws they’re going to break, we don’t have laws. A law is supposed to be like a solid line that everybody has to abide by, that nobody can step across. When people are allowed to step across with impunity, then we have no laws. It’s a lawless country.
I’m very much a person that believes in country, in national boundaries and that sort of thing. America is and always has been a melting pot. It’s always been a place where people come here from different cultures, different religions, different political beliefs, and different persuasions of all kind.
But the melting pot part of it is, you leave your country’s flag in that country, you leave your loyalty. You don’t have to hate it, you can still continue to love your old country. But when you come to this country, you are pledging allegiance to this country, not to the one you left. Why did you come here? To come to a better country. Well, do you want to make this country the same as the one you left? That’s silly.
The strength of America is a bunch of people from diverse backgrounds, coming together, putting aside their differences and getting behind one idea. We love freedom. We love freedom of religion, we love freedom of movement, we love freedom to decide what our children study and what they don’t study. We treasure freedom and liberty.
That’s the bottom line what the country’s founded on. That’s why people come here — for freedom. And all of the things that that entails, which is a myriad of things. We’ve got to be allegiant to this country. If you’re going to be an American, you got to have allegiance to America and not the country you left. If you like the country you left, go back to it. It’s that simple to me.
I don’t watch them. I don’t know anything about them. It’s everybody is individual decision about how they handle things. One thing I’ve learned in my 80 years is that there are two sides to every story.
I’ve come to find out some things I vehemently disagreed with had some validity to it after all. You can glean something out of a conversation you totally disagreed with. You can change your mind. Maybe not change your mind, but at least soften your approach. I think they should listen, but if they want to blow them off, that’s up to them.
I would like to think my faith guides everything that I do, but unfortunately, a lot of times it doesn’t. I slip across the boundary a bunch.
The hardest chapter I had to write in [my new] book was my chapter on faith. All my life I knew Jesus Christ died for you. I believed it, but I didn’t know why. Nobody told me that. Nobody told me about the shedding of blood for the remission of sins and all of the things that make up the new covenant. Nobody told me that. I didn’t know. Nobody sat down and explained the basics of Christianity to me.
I went to every kind of church. I went to dignified Presbyterian churches, I went to everything in between, up to Spirit-filled holiness churches, and still in all, nobody ever actually sat me down and told me what this was all about. So I decided I would find out for myself. I just took my Bible, started reading my Bible, and considering the opinions of other people who studied the Bible a lot that I respected. I tried to work out my own salvation. Which, to me, it’s grace. It’s all about grace.
What I had learned in my life was that the only way you could have salvation was to live a perfect life. Some of the churches I went to considered some of the mundane human actions sinful. You know: how people wore their hair, how they dressed, how they smoked cigarettes or chewed tobacco, or had a sip of wine, you’d go to hell for.
Then I read in the Bible where Jesus turned water into wine. That just contradicts those things. The legalism, the steadfast condemnation that you faced all the time when preachers would get up and preach.
And that’s all they preached. They scared you into going up front. They didn’t love you into it. They scared you into it. And once you got there you didn’t even know what you were doing. I went when I was a kid. I was giving my life to the Lord, but I was just scared into it. I wasn’t loved into it.
This is about love. It’s about somebody who loves you so much you can’t even fathom it. You can’t even imagine it. A woman told me one time that movies were sins too. If you were in a movie theater when Jesus comes back, he won’t have time to come get you. What sense does that make? He won’t have time to come get you in a movie theater? Wherever we happen to be, Jesus can get us.
Loved reading this. Thank you. Charlie Daniels is a good guy.
I can't tell you how pointed that is to me right now.
Less than twelve hours ago, while at our local school board meeting, I asked about the habit our public high school has regarding the pledge of allegiance.
The morning announcements over the intercom are concluded with; "We will now say the pledge ... I pledge allegianc to the flag ... " ... and the voice drops off.
The kids are left to decide for themselves whether they want to pledge or not, stand, hand over heart ... whatever .... it is all an elective.
The solicitor put me in my place, exasperated at my question, by telling me "This has all been resolved many times over the years, etc., blah blah blah"
So I went home and did some research.
Way back in 1943 ... not long before the United States entered WW2 (interesting timing for the subject) The Pledge of Allegiance to The Flag was brought before the Supreme Court and it was adjudicated to be unConstitutional to force a child to pledge and a violation of a student's 1st and 14th amendment rights to punish that child for refusing to pledge.
Folks, I'm gonn'a be 70 in February and I have NEVER in my life heard a whisper about this.
I'm willing to guess most FReepers here are in the same boat with me. None of us ever knew anything except to Pledge allegiance every morning in school.
It ....... just ......... was what it was.
I woke up early this morning with the exact same thought pattern Charlie articulates here ....
"I really don’t know. I have come to find out I seem to know very little about the world anymore. It’s a different world than what I grew up in. I used to be able to gauge people, especially when it came to patriotic things — but I really can’t anymore."
This piece was well worth the time it took to read it.
Charlie is well spoken and touches subjects of which most of us his age are concerned with. Lord willing the youngsters of today will evolve to hunger for the same answers he sought for himself between the covers of a Bible.
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