I greet you my fellow Americans on this holiday that merges the birthdays of our two most famous presidents.

What is interesting is that one president owned slaves while the other freed them. One was born with good connections, making better use of them than anyone expected, while the other, of humble origins, believed in then achieved the American dream.

Each of these men sacrificed for his country. One commanded and led an army, risking death continually to create a new nation. The other also commanded an army, seeking to preserve what the first president helped create.

As cynical as our times are, we must not lose sight of their greatness. Washington wanted no compensation for all of his time and the risks he took.

Lincoln, perhaps not pure in his decision to free slaves, was pure in his conviction that Americans show no animosity to each other after the war. He was a healer in the spiritual meaning of the word.

It is this spirituality that made America great. Washington could not have done so much for free without the religious values Puritans brought to the continent. Lincoln could not have dreamed of being president and also of doing something great for humanity without his unshakeable faith in God and the knowledge that he could turn to The Bible for inspiration, wisdom and catharsis.

This is important, for when people say there must be a separation of church and state, they usually mean religion is dangerous and should not influence politics. That isn’t how our Founding Fathers saw it, how Puritans saw it or how Lincoln saw it.

The Puritans, who I admit were highly opinionated, believed that politics ruins religion more than religion ruins politics. They believed people should live their lives exemplifying the best in religious principles, and that they ought to religiously watch and act to prevent government from dictating what moral principles will be followed.

Our Founding Fathers admired the Puritans. They knew it was the Puritans who provided the spark for liberty the patriots inflamed, and they knew the spark for liberty came from religion not politics.

What the Founding Fathers may not have known is that the fire that burned so bright in the Puritans was fed by belief in the Second Coming, that the patriots were using the energy from that conviction to start a rebellion and create a nation.

It was this nation Lincoln felt he had to save. He knew the nation’s principles were not created by men but by God. Lincoln knew too that he was serving God and giving a new life to those who had been denied by men the freedom God gave them at birth.

In our cynical times we look past lofty principles. We look for hypocrisy.

We say Washington owned slaves so he does not deserve respect and cannot possibly be a hero. We say Lincoln originally felt black men to be inferior, so his first thought must diminish his decisions to free slaves and reunite the nation.

My countrymen, our cynicism makes us an unhappy and uninspiring country. Our lust to label someone a hypocrite reveals how little we believe in ourselves and how naive we are not to realize that greatness and goodness are not going to be perfect.

Our hypocrisy watch also shows the world how foolish we are. We would rather blindly reject a hero because of his bad points, than blindly assume our hero could do no wrong.

With this attitude we cannot be great again. We need heroes to inspire us so we can make the changes America needs to make.

Two changes are to stop suing and stop being promiscuous. These acts could lay the grouondwork for truly heroic acts like opposing the Patriot Act and our police state.

We feel we have the right to sue. We think we are free when all barriers are dropped in our sex lives. Unfortuneately, this self-centeredness keeps us from worrying about freedoms far greater than these: such as not being watched by police and having no fear of being arrested for something we said or something we might do.

There is nothing heroic about lusting for a lawsuit or the seduction of strangers. There is everything heroic about complaining police have too much power and laws need to change so we cannot be arrested for our opinion or our appearance.

Most Americans have no position of power to do something like Washington or Lincoln did. Yet as a nation, if we have courage and wisdom we can act heroically.

A characteristic Washington and Lincoln had to complement their ambition and vision is restraint. Our nation has ambition but no vision. Most importantly we have no restraint.

It is our lack of restraint that makes us cynical of true heroes. It is the lack of restraint that makes us glorify false heroes.

We need to stop being slaves to our worst passions. We need to seek once again to be a free people, to risk our lives for the freedom God gave us.

We must honor our greatest heroes. We must fight for and exemplify true freedom. We must be the shining star for our grand children that the Puritans were for the Founding Fathers and the Founding Fathers were for Lincoln.

Copyright © 2025 by David Vaszko