Sunday, July 3, 2016

Happy Birthday

I'm a sap for patriotism.

It may be a generational thing. I was too young in the sixties to "protest" anything. I'm too old now to worry about not being cool. I guess it's not cool anymore to love your country. You are supposed to point out its wrongs; its faults; its failings. The current resident of the White House is quick to proclaim that the US is no better than any other country, and how dare anyone say it is? What hubris! (from one who knows hubris). Perhaps he thinks he's overseeing the local ladies' garden club. He does have a phone, and a pen to write out those calligraphied luncheon invitations, after all.

Too bad. Too bad for him. For someone who has reaped the rewards of this country more than almost anyone, too bad he is too arrogant to acknowledge the opportunities he could only find here.

Me? Life hasn't been a breeze. I'm from the working class -- we don't get the breaks, the kudos for a job well done. We just do our jobs. We packed our kids' lunch boxes every morning with peanut butter sandwiches and packed one for ourselves, before we shuttled the boys out the front door to their public elementary school, before we shuttled ourselves off in our four-year-old used Taurus to a job we tolerated because the kids needed new jeans, after all, and all those personal checks for RIF books and after-school basketball league and we needed to make the next payment on the saxophone that would last through one year of fifth grade band and then be abandoned in a corner next to smelly tube socks and two-day-old nachos that required a chisel to dislodge them from their final resting place on a plate purloined from the kitchen cupboard.

Some summers our vacation was a two-night stay at a state campground. Even if it was only fifty miles from home, it felt like a vacation and we had fun. We pulled board games out of the camper's storage locker and played and laughed and threw gentle insults at one another, disparaging each other's deficient Sorry skills. We blazed hot dogs on a little Weber camp grill. We stuck marshmallows on found sticks and generally burnt the little buggers to a crisp and decided to let them fall into the fire, rather than risk permanent taste bud annihilation.

And we were happy.

The Fourth of July parade always makes my heart swell. To experience Independence Day properly, I believe one must live in or find a small town. People there don't care if they look goofy in their star-spangled tee shirts. The sweat rolls down their necks as they fire up sparklers for even the littlest kids.They grasp their young'ns around the waist and point them toward the floppy-footed clown marching down the street, tossing out candy. They kid one another about eighties hairstyles as the high school marching band, their alma mater, steps past, but they only get to hear the rat-a-tat of the drums -- the trumpets don't pick up their parts until the whole squad is a block down the street, right by Neuen's Western Store.

And they stand up and salute or put their hand over their heart or just rise silently and give a little nod when the veterans march by carrying the American flag.

Maybe we don't have the conscious thought at that moment, but we know how lucky we are. And we know that many men -- uncles we never even got to meet, our first cousin who barely had one summer month after graduation before he got drafted and sent for basic training, our big brother; braved hell for something they might not have even understood, but they did it to give us the chance to have picnics and act like goofs on the Fourth of July and rib each other by the campfire.

So, yes, I'm patriotic. I love my country. The US isn't just about the people we elect or the ones we didn't vote for but are forced to endure.

The US is US. It's my dad and my mom, who endured the depression and lived and thrived and built a business from the sale of eighty acres of farmland. It's me with my transistor radio under my pillow, a staticky "Incense and Peppermints" saturating my dreams. It's my kids ripping paper off a box from under the Christmas tree to find Optimus Prime (just what they wanted!) It's my son smiling, a little shaky; standing at the altar, watching his bride-to-be escorted by her dad, glide up the aisle.

The US is a promise. Sometimes the promise is a pipe dream, sometimes it's a dream come true. What we have, regardless, is a possibility.

I'm all for possibilities.

Happy Birthday.






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