As I was watching one of the news channels the other day, I heard an alarming fact.

The Ivy League school of Harvard was given an exit exam that dealt with the history of our country, and the students did not do so well. It seems that most of these students could not answer elementary American history questions, such as, who said, "Give me liberty or give me death."

It was, of course, a quote from Patrick Henry.

It was not so much the fact that they missed questions like this, as it was why they missed them.

We are a country of great heritage that is slowly but surely going the way of ruin. Prayer has been taken out of schools while kids are walking into these same classrooms and killing their fellow students.

Abortion is used as a method of birth control while murderers on death row are given a reprieve because someone feels sorry for them. They fail to think about the life of the victim whose family grieves the loss of a loved one.

We are a nation divided today like never before. Everything is looked upon today as if there is all gray area and no black and white.

But there is black and white. There are absolutes. And the fact that we fail to recognize this fact is the reason that the country is the way it is today.

What if Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, or George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln were alive today? Do you think they would be pleased with what they see? I, for one, think that they would not.

Do you think they would be happy with a government that can take your land away from you simply because it thinks that it’s a habitat for an endangered species, or one that takes about 50 percent of your hard-earned money every year and makes you believe that its doing you a favor if it happens to give you a little back at the end of the year?

What do you think they would say if they saw the citizens of a once great nation behaving in an immoral fashion as we are accustomed to seeing them today?

I believe that our founding fathers would be appalled at the way this nation has turned out, if they even recognized it at all.

Our forefathers did not set out to create what would become the greatest nation in the history of the world &045; it was a by-product of a fight against tyrannical rule, a rule that now seems to be rearing its ugly head from our own government.

Case in point &045; the seizure at gunpoint of 6-year-old Elian Gonzales from a private citizen’s house. We are headed down the road to the downfall of a once great country, and the sad part is that most people, even if they are aware of it, don’t

even care.

By the way, Happy Independence Day.

Enjoy the holiday while you can. I don’t know how many more we have left.