What are you doing to celebrate Memorial Day?

How will you honor the soldiers, sailors and airmen who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep America safe, free and great for more than 240 years?

My son Cameron, as usual, will take his daughters to a military cemetery and remind them who those fallen soldiers were and why America was worth fighting and dying for.

Cameron’s kids — my grandkids — will be taught what I taught him and my daughter Ashley and what my father drilled into me.

I remember how I first learned about the greatness of America and its military.

Riding out to the Reagan ranch, sitting in the front seat of my father’s car, he would regale me with stories about great Americans and sing all the songs of the U.S. military — the Army, Navy, Marines, even the Coast Guard.

I was lucky.

I was brought up by my parents to love America, the Founding Fathers and our sacred political foundations — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the ideals of freedom and equality under law.

Kids today are being brought up to hate America and everything about its past and present.

For one big example, they’re being taught in schools from an early age that this is a country built for and by slave owners and that it is still racist in its bones, its justice system and its government policies.

We all know who’s preaching this untruthful, harmful and dangerous lesson plan — Democrats and the liberal media.

The race card is the only card they know how to deal in politics and they’ve been playing it in elections for decades.

They played it against my father and every Republican or conservative presidential candidate or Supreme Court nominee since then.

Just this week, they immediately threw down the race card when Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis announced they were running for president in the Republican primary.

Scott got the Clarence Thomas treatment.

Like the Supreme Court justice, Scott grew up dirt poor and made a huge success for himself.

Yet he was slimed by other Black people in Congress and the liberal media as being an Uncle Tom who “doesn’t know what it means to be Black.”

Hello? Doesn’t this sort of meet the definition of racism?

As for Gov. DeSantis, his candidacy was greeted with a warning from the national NAACP that because of his state’s “hate-inspired” leadership — i.e., DeSantis — Florida was not safe for blacks to travel to or live in.

The NAACP — once vitally important to bringing equality to black Americans but now embarrassingly irrelevant — was just trying to get some media attention.

But their hypocritical card trick backfired when it was pointed out that millions of Black people are happily living and running businesses in Florida — and that the chairman of the NAACP’s board lives in Tampa.

Today, I’m very proud to be an American.

Do I have problems with some bad things that have been done by our governments in the past — and especially the current one? Of course.

America is not perfect, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it and don’t try to do everything I can to make it better.

As I said, I was lucky.

My dad didn’t wait for the schools to teach me stories about the greatness of America or the military — he did it.

Too often we think someone else is going to step up and do the teaching we need.

But if we want our kids to learn to love America and to learn why they should honor those men and women who died to make and keep it great, we’ve got to instill those values in them ourselves.

Memorial Day is a good day to remember to start doing that — and then practice it the rest of the year.

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan