In the fight for the future of our republic, everyone can do something.
Ahead of Texas Scorecard’s annual Conservative Leader Awards dinner this year, someone asked me what our theme was for the evening. Fortunately, the team always comes up with a theme to help drive the way we put the program together, so I was able to respond, “It’s ‘real fighters.’”
This fellow laughed and said, “Next year, you need to have a theme for the rest of us!” Except … I know all the stuff he is involved in, from fights at city hall and the school house, and beyond. He is definitely in the fight – he just doesn’t see it that way.
That conversation made me think of Martin Treptow.
At the age of 23, working as a barber in Iowa in 1917, he answered the nation’s call to fight against the Axis powers. A year later, he was at one of the most important battles of the Great War in Europe.
A messenger was needed to deliver critical information to one of the platoons. Not exactly the most glorious assignment, but Private Treptow volunteered, grabbed the message … and ran into a barrage of gunfire – giving his life. He did what he could do.
Among his positions was a small diary he kept in his uniform jacket pocket. In it he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”
Each of us need to make that same pledge. To fight cheerfully, doing what we can, and where we can, to advance the cause of liberty.
