Let us hear your thoughts, please. The more specific, the better, especially in terms of geography, family, etc.–KSH.
An Open Thread on Independence Day 2011
Posted in Uncategorized
Let us hear your thoughts, please. The more specific, the better, especially in terms of geography, family, etc.–KSH.
I am going to a ceremony at Fort Sam Houston, TX where I served several times while on active duty and am now employed as a civil servant. The band, the color guard, the assembled Wounded Warriors, and the speeches will be inspirational, poignant and moving. The place the ceremony will be held is the same one that saw the first military flight in US history, the base from which General Pershing launched the punitive expedition, the post from which my own grandfather was discharged in 1919 with his $82.40 in bonus and travel pay and the place both my father and father-in-law trained for WWII. Fort Sam now trains military medics in all three Services, researches combat casualty care, and rehabilitates the cruelly wounded casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan. To say that I am proud is to say too little. God bless America!
Yesterday (Pentecost 3) during announcements I showed the congregation my pocket-size US Constitution. I said that if anyone wished to purchase one I would happily give them details during coffee hour. Only one person approached me wanting to buy a copy. This person is the only naturalized citizen in our congregation, she is a native of Korea. Also, I received only one Independence Day greeting card. It was from the same person. In the card she had written five words, “Pray, pray, pray for America”. I was both humbled and impressed by this woman’s love for America. Would that we all were so motivated.
Pocket-size US Constitution available from the Government Printing Office, stock #052-071-01509-4
steve gartman, Trinity Anglican, Yuba City, California
I think of our inauspicious, tiny beginnings, and what we are now and marvel at the blessings.
Took the time to reflect on the risks taken by our nation’s founders. They risked and often lost their wealth, futures, and lives, so we would have the rights, liberties, and bounties we enjoy today.
God save the United States and make us as strong in goodwill and honor towards the commonweal and liberty as they were.
Today at Deerfield Episcopal Retirement Community in Asheville I helped serve ice cream at our community celebration – vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry with various sauces, nuts, and cherries – while we listened to patriotic music. On Sundays and holidays we have only one meal in the dining room at lunchtime – pork barbeque, hamburgers, hot dogs, corn, salads including potato salads and pasta salad, pie and ice cream. We also rejoiced in the celebration of our liberty and in the 148th anniversary of Gettysburg. Our Sons of Union Veterans Camp met Saturday for lunch.
This year we marked Independence Day by attending the Fourth of July ‘picnic’ put on most years by a women’s group representative of American citizens in this Australian city. We missed the speech by the (female) US consul but watched the numerous young families and groups of teenagers as we walked across the playing field venue past a collection of vintage 1960-70s US cars. Without listening to accents I found it challenging to tell casually dressed Americans from Australians, though the Aussies have better manners in public (why can’t Americans learn from them instead of vice versa?), and many of each were of Arab, Asian or (Asian) Indian extraction. Inside the building, to present ‘America’ to this part of the world there were for sale typically American home-baked goods, fabric or wood craft items, a huge selection of candy, Bush’s black beans for US$5.50 a can or Libby’s pumpkin (large) for $10; outside in a courtyard beer and wine were available with vouchers, elsewhere there were standard 4th of July hotdogs, and baby animals to pet for the children, and we also caught an excellent, entertaining performance by the Australian Army local band with a kilted guest bagpiper.
Most Fourths, I reflect a while on what my forebears – such as the Massachusetts colonist from Chichester in England who arrived in 1650 and had about 1000 descendants by 1750, his gg-grandson and a German immigrant forebear of mine who were both tomahawked during the French & Indian War at opposite ends of Pennsylvania, the colonial Virginia Army private who died probably a British POW in South Carolina, the US soldier from Wash. DC who died childless of illness in 1848 at the border in Texas ([i]still[/i] mourned, by his siblings’ descendants my great-aunt and great-grandmother 120 years later), or my father who worked under top security clearance through WWII – would think today. Would they all jump at the chance to instigate others abroad to rise up in arms against those over them and clear the way for US-style technological progress, entrepreneurial values and secularism [i]as is clearly proceeding[/i] where America is now fighting wars? Is America, in fact, so favored by the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that our nation perpetually has His mandate to wage war on His behalf…..to spread secularism? to enable Islam? (I ask this also as a DAR.) It sometimes seems since the mid-20th century the nation may have jumped the shark with respect to modeling what makes or could make a society great.
Only after the 150-year sequence RevWar-War of 1812-Civil War-WWI-WWII did USA the Superpower emerge, as the Marshall Plan was put to work, and some of the post-WWII generation quite idealistically took up other opportunities as a nation to build and spread the kingdom of God on earth and confront opposing visions. Yet 50 years on we had enabled Communist China (they still are Communists!) to start buying up parts of the West, the US is in a recession, and what can we say post-Vietnam about Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, for example…..where there was ‘trouble’, the US +/- allies prosecuted a war to end [i]their[/i] troubles, enabling Muslim dominance of society and endangering numerous Christian populations? (not to mention, past and current US policies in Nigeria, Guinea and elsewhere.) Muslim dominance and Christian persecution is also a looming problem in nations that just experienced their ‘Arab springtime’ courtesy of US technology and its principle of ‘principled interference’, one might call it.
There seems to have been a derailment of the nation’s Founding purpose (which after all, caused the young nation’s leaders to exclude the Barbary pirates from the former’s entrepreneurial vision). Perhaps it’s somewhat akin to the mis-interpretation of Vatican II’s output, which is being laboriously corrected now. Those mis-interpretations allowed parts of the Catholic Church to form bad alliances and fall away from its mission after the mid-1960s, which in turn enabled some Kennedys, Nancy Pelosi, Mario and Andrew Cuomo, and so on to apply their mis-understandings of the US’s founding principles even before the President with the Arab Muslim middle name got to the Constitution.
It is too long to quote here but I recommend, e.g., pp. 50-52 in “Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures” by J. Ratzinger (Ignatius Press 2006) as a helpful summary of the problem. We could say the US now lives in a post-Enlightenment public culture regrettably characterized by dis-empowerment and cultural crudity and crassness, to the extent it has not helped foment or forge an [i]Enlightened Christianity[/i]; that is what is wanted now to be able to carry out sorely needed course corrections to the US Ship of State.
In my morning prayers, I gave special thanks for the blessing of my family having been born Americans, and the innumerable benefits that circumstance conveys. The whole family (minus my son who is in the USAF in air traffic controller school) plus guests met at the farm for a pot-luck supper followed by fireworks on the hillside in front of the house. The evening ended with a few bottles of Champagne sabraged and a toast drunk to the Republic.