General Jim Mattis

It is our protector, but it also must be protected by all of us.

Well, certainly, if we don't all protect it, this idea that we're going to just pass on these freedoms and there's not going to be any kind of interruption of them is something that history would refute.

We may be a very, very young country in the history of the world.

We are the oldest democracy.

How many people in the world's history have had the freedoms we have?

And it shows why we have got a duty

equal to every right that we get to pass those rights on undamaged, I think.

I don't have a good answer for you other than to say, in my case, I was having a whale of a good time in college, lost my draft deferment.

And as raised by the greatest generation,

that felt the country didn't have to be perfect to be worth fighting for.

And if Uncle Sam said, you're going, we all went.

A few didn't, but 99% of us carried out our patriotic chore.

And as my Army buddies put it, you were the dumbest draft dodger we ever met.

You joined the Marine infantry to get out of the Army.

I say, well, yeah, but it worked out.

But my point is that each of us has a responsibility, and it's not based on a perfect country.

There's never been a perfect country.

But you'd have to go a long way to find a country more willing to point out where we have fallen short.

where we have such documents as our founding fathers gave us because they were guided by the ancients.

They gave us that one man locked up in a Birmingham jail without any access to any of those documents, but they're so in all of our minds that he could write a letter from a Birmingham jail and say, America, you are falling short.