A Florida motorist was arrested Tuesday after Polk County deputies said he sideswiped an ambulance and injured a paramedic in the crash, WFLA-TV reported.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office said an ambulance was traveling north on Harden Boulevard when a driver in a Volkswagen Jetta made a U-turn in front of the ambulance, the station said.

‘He was vulgar and rude to the deputy and had to be removed from the patrol car after he refused to get out of it.’

“After completing the U-turn, the Jetta entered the lane occupied by the ambulance, and the vehicles collided,” the sheriff’s office said, according to WFLA.

Deputies said the Jetta driver then left the scene of the crash, the station reported, while a paramedic in the back of the ambulance was taken to a hospital with a neck injury following the crash.

The sheriff’s office told WFLA that deputies went to the home where the Jetta was registered and spoke with the owner of the car — and she said her nephew had been driving it.

Gregory McManus, 41, was found asleep on a couch, deputies told the station.

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“When deputies awakened him, he admitted that he had been involved in the crash, but claimed it was the ambulance driver’s fault,” Polk deputies said, according to the station.

The sheriff’s office said video from the ambulance “clearly showed that McManus had caused the crash,” WFLA noted.

Sheriff Grady Judd had this to say, according to the station: “Gregory McManus not only caused the crash, he fled from the scene without checking on anybody, and then had the audacity to claim the other driver was at fault. He was vulgar and rude to the deputy and had to be removed from the patrol car after he refused to get out of it. I doubt there is a responsible bone in his body.”

McManus was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of a crash with injury, WFLA said.

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​Florida, Polk county sheriff’s office, Polk county sheriff grady judd, Ambulance sideswiped, Arrest, Leaving the scene of a crash with injury, Crime 

A friend recently asked why so many Americans seem embarrassed by their own country.

The question came during the annual Fourth of July arguments about patriotism, flags, and whether America deserves to be celebrated. It reminded me of something the late Robert Woodson often said about America’s beginning.

Love does not require perfection. It requires stewardship. That seems like a good way to care for a family. And it seems like a good way to care for a nation.

Woodson acknowledged the contradiction at our founding: a nation proclaiming that all men are created equal while tolerating slavery. Others point to limited rights for women and other shortcomings present at the nation’s birth.

What interested Woodson was not the diagnosis but the response. He compared America to a child born with a birth defect. Loving parents do not deny the condition or abandon the child because of it. They adapt, advocate, protect, teach, accommodate, and love.

They learn stewardship.

Caregiving taught me that lesson long before I heard Woodson apply it to a nation. During one particularly difficult season, a wise friend told me something that permanently changed the way I viewed caregiving.

“Your wife has a Savior. You are not that Savior.”

For years I had lived as though my job was to fix everything. If I researched enough, worked hard enough, and sacrificed enough, I could somehow force life toward the outcome I wanted.

Eventually I collided with a truth every caregiver must learn. I could not control the outcome. I was accountable for my stewardship.

That realization changed the way I looked at life and the world.

For years I believed life would finally begin after the next surgery, the next recovery, the next crisis, or the next milestone. Like many caregivers, I kept telling myself that if we could just get through this one thing, then we could finally get on with our lives.

Eventually I realized this wasn’t a rehearsal. This was my life.

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SAHAB ZARIBAF/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images

When I stopped trying to get through life in order to get on with life, I quit treading water waiting for rescue and learned to swim.

The problems remained. My stewardship changed.

Too often we tell ourselves that happiness waits on the other side of some future event. If only this election goes differently. If only this grievance is resolved. Then we can finally live.

Stewardship asks another question. Not, “Why wasn’t I given something better?” But, “What am I going to do with what I’ve been given?”

I’ve seen the difference between cultures that cultivate stewardship and cultures that discourage it.

Years ago, while helping establish our prosthetic limb outreach in West Africa, I worked alongside local technicians learning to build prosthetic legs for their own people. In one clinic, nearly every decision required approval from above.

One day I asked a technician a simple question. “What do you think?”

The puzzled expression on his face answered before he spoke. It wasn’t that he lacked intelligence. No one had ever expected him to own the decision.

America, at its best, asks that question every day. What do you think? What will you build? What responsibility are you willing to carry? That expectation lies near the heart of the American experiment.

America’s founding principles created room for reform because the nation’s founding documents proclaimed truths many of the founders themselves failed to live fully. Those same principles later became the standard by which Americans challenged slavery and expanded civil rights.

The story of America is not one of perfection. It is one of stewardship.

RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion

asbe/iStock/Getty Images

Of course, stewardship is not the only response to a defect. Some people learn from it. Others exploit it.

Every family caring for someone with disabilities eventually encounters people more interested in the diagnosis than the person. Nations experience something similar. America’s original contradiction has served both as a call to greater fidelity and as a tool for those seeking power through perpetual grievance.

Woodson understood the difference. One path produces stewardship. The other manufactures resentment.

I love this country not because it is flawless, but because it repeatedly calls each generation to measure itself against ideals higher than itself.

When I look at my grandchildren, I hope they inherit a nation that prizes freedom, embraces responsibility, rewards merit, and teaches that life is shaped more by stewardship than by grievance.

What if we stopped waiting for the perfect election, the perfect apology, the perfect reckoning, or the perfect outcome before deciding to engage faithfully with the country we have? Imagine the gratitude, creativity, service, and responsibility that would follow.

Parents of children with disabilities understand this. Caregivers understand this. Love does not require perfection. It requires stewardship.

That seems like a good way to care for a family. And it seems like a good way to care for a nation.

​America, America 250, Caregiving, Faith, Family, Fourth of july, Gratitude, Opinion & analysis, Patriotism, Slavery, Stewardship 

While millions of Americans participate in Fourth of July festivities, many don’t know what exactly it is they’re celebrating; others may vaguely know, but the complete history of the United States is something they’ve long forgotten or were never taught.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn revisits a powerful but largely forgotten story about America’s dramatic birth — the hidden plots, betrayals, and extraordinary character that defined the days right before July 4.

“All of us celebrate Fourth of July — everybody does. But nobody knows what’s happening the days before the Fourth of July. … This is when this country was being born in two cities at the same time and on two completely different tracks,” says Glenn, “and those two tracks slam together on one morning.”

“Because while [Thomas] Jefferson is writing … what kind of men we could be [in the Declaration of Independence], George Washington is discovering the kind of men that we already have among us. The British fleet are coming,” he continues.

But a bloody war wasn’t the only plot to foil America. While the British fleet sat in the harbor awaiting the signal to invade New York, British Crown-appointed New York Governor William Tryon and New York City Mayor David Mathews were scheming to assassinate or kidnap George Washington.

“[Tryon and Matthews] are quietly buying off Continental soldiers, paying them to switch sides the moment the British land. … The minute the British land, they’re to turn their guns around and blow the powder magazines, seize the bridge at the north end of Manhattan, so Washington’s whole army is trapped on that island like fish in a barrel,” Glenn recounts.

One of the men in Washington’s personal “lifeguard” (secret service) — Thomas Hickey — was in on this plot.

“Hickey gets himself thrown in jail for passing counterfeit money, and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He bragged to another prisoner about the conspiracy … well, that prisoner talked, and it landed in front of a secret committee tasked with sniffing out exactly this kind of treason committee led by a young New Yorker named John Jay,” says Glenn, highlighting Jay’s contributions from writing the famous Federalist Papers to becoming the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jay’s task force, he says, is often described by historians as “the first American intelligence agency.”

Hickey’s trial for treason happened at the same time Jefferson was penning the Declaration of Independence — two “tracks” Glenn says “come together” in a remarkable way.

On Monday, June 28, 1776, Hickey was publicly hanged for treason, making him “the first soldier this country ever executed for treason before we were a country,” Glenn explains.

At that same time, Jefferson went to Independence Hall with the finished draft of the Declaration of Independence in tow.

“One single morning, in one young nation that didn’t legally even exist yet, in one city, the words of who we wanted to become were first being read into the record. And another city just up the road, a man was being hung by a rope for trying to strangle that nation in its cradle,” Glenn summarizes. “The promise and the betrayal in the same hour — 90 miles apart.”

Four days later on July 2, Congress voted to approve a resolution for independence.

“The ink isn’t even dry and the enemy is already in the water,” says Glenn.

“It would have been so easy in that moment of terror — invasion coming, traitors in the ranks, the mayor himself in on it — for Washington to become the very thing that they were fighting.”

Instead he refused to become a tyrant, choosing to uphold the rule of law and the ideals of the revolution even when it was risky and difficult.

“In the middle of the most dangerous month of their life, with a knife already at the Republic’s throat, they chose process over panic, law over vengeance. And in the same breath, in the same week, they put their names down on this document that said power has to answer to something higher than its own power,” says Glenn.

“That’s who we are. That’s who we were. That’s who we can be every day going forward.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Glenn beck, George washington, John jay, Thomas jefferson, Independence, Fourth of july, The glenn beck podcast