This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/an-acknowledgment-of-the-gift-of-america/

Gratitude is the antidote Wisconsinites can use in a time of grievance

They started the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction webinar about racial “equity” Thursday with a ritual acknowledgment that sounded more like an apology, one of those statements about supposedly stolen land that have become fashionable at academic and government events.

“We recognize the original homelands of the Menominee and Ho Chunk people,” started the script. From that anodyne sentiment, it went on to mention every other tribe now in Wisconsin before citing “the repeated violations of sovereignty” by the “invaders that have impacted Wisconsin and the Indigenous people for the last 400 years and into the present.” It affirmed that “this acknowledgement is insufficient,” that it doesn’t “undo the harm,” and that we must be “mindful of our present participation” in the ways “colonialism is current and ongoing” in Wisconsin.

The state that now is here and the country of which it’s part are, goes the argument, more or less invasive species. As one accompanying slide put it in screen-filling capitals, “YOU ARE ON INDIGENOUS LAND.” Among the helpful materials provided was a map of overlapping tribal territories of 1800 so viewers could ponder the rightful owners of whatever “unceded land” they occupied.

The tone of moral condemnation certainly fit the webinar’s main event: Ibram X. Kendi, launched to fame by a series of books about how intractably racist America is, answered questions about how important it is for teachers to instruct children about the racist depravity of their society.

“In a moment like 2024, the educator in a way becomes as crucial as a freedom fighter,” Kendi intoned, because “minds are being targeted.”

Targeted how? Kendi harkened back to his own middle-class New York upbringing in the 1990s. Son of two black-power activists from the ’60s, he saw social problems and believed them to stem from people behaving in self-harming ways. But then he realized America is “a deeply unequal society” and that the inequality stems from its inherent racism. Unless teachers pound home that message, he said, black children will loathe their own skin and white boys will be recruited by supremacists to “engage in a mass shooting.”

Teach them that America’s still lousy with racism to its core, though, and they’ll engage in Kendi’s “antiracist” action, which he most famously summed up as, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

Theme of the day: You’ve got it coming, America.  The messages all seem organized not around specified action that leads to absolution but, rather, endless accusation, around getting us all to agree that America is illegitimate.

If it is, what justifies clinging to its rotten fruits like free speech or private property anyhow? You can see where that opens up possibilities for those who long for a Year Zero.

If you instead think it’s Year 248 of the great American experiment in liberty that started in 1776 and want there to be a Year 249, if you simply don’t favor a society that’s an endless cage match of grievance, what can you do? How do you resist what the DPI is pushing? 

I suggest the calendar offers us an upcoming antidote: Gratitude.

I mean Memorial Day. Sure, there’ll be cookouts later, but spare a moment for the day’s serious purpose — the communal acknowledgement that we live on land that was made free by the more than 1 million Americans who died defending it.

Certainly none of them wanted to die, but our imperfect country was given a chance to stick around and overcome its flaws because they were willing to do so. The least we owe them is a moment’s thought and thanks this one day of the year.

The dead are too many to name, but history singles some out. One is a Wisconsin man, born near Hatfield, Cpl. Mitchell Red Cloud Jr.

Red Cloud volunteered for World War II at 16, fighting with the Marines at Guadalcanal and Okinawa. After the war, he went home, started a family, then re-enlisted, this time in the Army, in time for Korea. He was manning a listening post ahead of his unit’s positions on Nov. 5, 1950, when he heard stealthily approaching Chinese troops. He raised the alarm and began firing. He kept firing with “utter fearlessness,” as the Medal of Honor citation put it, even after he was struck by gunfire. He died, but not before buying his comrades time to evacuate the wounded.

“Dauntless courage and gallant self-sacrifice” indeed, as the citation reads above President Truman’s signature. Red Cloud, who was of Ho Chunk descent, is buried at Winnebago Mission near Black River Falls. Anyone can visit and acknowledge that we live in a Wisconsin and an America given to us by such courage.

All we can do is hope to live up to such a gift.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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