Andrew Cuomo spoke for millions of Americans when he said, "We're not going to make America great again.  It was never that great.  We have not reached greatness.  We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged." 

These millions of Americans whom Cuomo spoke for are just plain wrong, but let's not pretend they don't exist.  The progressive skew that is de rigueur in our educational system has left these millions of Americans intellectually handicapped.  Their view of America is paralyzed by an adolescent but appealing self-indulgence in cynicism.  This indulgence was once expressed in a mid-1960s song lyric: "Another Pleasant Valley Sunday here in status symbol land, rows of houses that are all the same, and no one seems to care."

Who lived in those suburban homes, spurring a disdain for Americans that the left has bitterly clung to with expanding hate for over 50 years?  Mostly the 13 million American World War II veterans and participants who watched 407,000 of their compatriots die in a struggle for liberty and freedom for people who were not Americans and did not live on American soil.

Cuomo can see no greatness in that.  No courage in that.

When the war was over, America withdrew from the occupied nations.  Americans airlifted food to a prostrate Europe through the Marshall Plan.  Meanwhile, socialist USSR continued to occupy and starve East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Austria and Finland.  Cuomo's Democratic cohorts such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Cynthia Nixon, and an estimated 40% of Democratic Millennials firmly believe we should follow a trail blazed by those enslaving socialist usurpers, murderers, and thieves.  Is that the greatness my dad should have expected while fearfully patrolling the Pacific at night, all of 18 years old?

My father's best friend, John, lost an eye fighting the war in Italy.  A bullet went right through it; he was mildly deformed thereafter.  He did not take out his glass eye to amuse or horrify us.  He lived to 91 with attendant headaches, yet he always greeted everyone he met with a broad Kentuckian "Hello, there!" 

My father had another friend named George.  George was on the Indianapolis.  George survived four days in shark-infested Pacific waters.  His skin was peeling off his bones as they rescued him.

Has Andrew Cuomo ever watched the man next to him die?  Has he for one second been that engaged with America?  Has he ever had to pick himself up after witnessing such an event to continue fighting and later reassemble the pieces of his shattered youth to build a home for his wife and children?  Has it ever flashed through Cuomo's brain that he might, in a moment, die so other men can be free?

I give belated thanks to John and George, and to my dad: because of you, I had exposure to some great American men in my life.  It is either because of a peculiar and indifferent blind spot or through an outright lie of preening convenience that Andrew Cuomo has never met great Americans like you gentlemen.