When the woke mob was tearing down statues of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and more in 2020, like so many, I was quickly appalled by the so-called online lessons his teachers were submitting his then eight-year-old intellect to, so I started searching for things for him to read.
I looked on my local library’s shelves for the good guys with six-shooters and laser guns I had grown up with, but could not find any such heroes in the youth section—a few of the titles were upstairs among the adult fiction.
He flipped through Harry Potter books, The Hunger Games stuff, and more and kept shaking his head.
“I don’t know dad, all these guys are dumb.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is always some girl who has to think for the boy,” he said. “That’s great for the girls, but I want a book where the boy hero is not stupid and, you know, where he does something cool.”
I started to say that Harry Potter was the main hero in those books, but before I spoke, I remembered that the girl characters in those stories actually do all the hard thinking. I then swallowed all the advice I’d give later on men and women and realized he was right to want heroes that resonate with him.
“What about the history stuff — all the cool heroes from history?” I asked as I walked to peruse the nonfiction in the youth section. He didn’t follow, but I took a look. There were a lot of books on those shelves, but they were all weak and politically correct — some of them were obnoxiously so.
I found him looking at comic books and asked what American heroes they had talked about in school.
“Paul Revere, but he just rode some horse and shouted the ‘British are coming!’”
“Do you know that the British were marching out of Boston to take the people’s guns?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“Did you talk about the ‘shot heard ‘round the world’?”
He shook his head.
“Did you know that the British in Boston, under General Thomas Gage, actually seized Paul Revere’s guns?”
“No, why?”
I told him I’d tell him the whole story at bedtime. That night, as I told the story, I realized a book needed to be written for his generation. So, I began to research and to write Cool Heroes for Boys—20 True Tales of Adventure, an adventure-laden book where every story is about a 15-minute read — the ideal length for a bedtime story.
A few years after that library visit, my son (Christian) and I went to Boston to walk the Freedom Trail on the anniversary of the shot heard round the world; in fact, over the years of research, we went together to explore the history of many other heroes.
Along the way, freedom — especially our Second Amendment-protected freedom — became a big part of our exploration, as boys need the action scenes.
He sat up when he found out that George Washington had two horses shot out from under him in the Battle of Monogahela; the story of Sergeant Alvin York’s capture of the German soldiers thrilled him, but most of his questions were why York, at first, refused to fight; he wanted to see the revolver Sam Walker fought with and was blown away by how it helped to win the West; a young Teddy Roosevelt’s pursuit of outlaws in Dakota Territory made him want to hunt bad guys; he wanted to hear more about Alan Turing’s code breaking in World War II; and he really wanted to know why Davy Crockett stood against then President Andrew Jackson and how and why he died fighting at the Alamo.
What I found is that we can’t expect today’s teachers to expose our children to heroes for boys (most of their teachers will be women). Parents and grandparents need to find ways to expose our boys to heroes who shaped America and the world. The best way to do that is through real stories of adventure and triumph.
This is critical; after all, if we leave them without understanding the true history and nature of our freedom, then we’ll leave them vulnerable to woke teachers or professors who might deceptively turn them against what has made America the light of the world — I know quite a few well-educated, conservative parents who don’t understand why or how their sons or daughters were turned against their own freedom.
The truth, and all the critical thinking it inspires, is the armor they need to defeat ideologies designed to convince young minds that our freedom needs to be voted away.
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