Happy Birthday, America!

Red barns and American flags seem to go well together.  They just do.  Can’t say just why.  It’s one of those intuitive things. 

By the side of the road, Route 25, in New Hampshire's Lakes Region

Maybe it’s because barns are a symbol of work; of storing up the summer’s harvest to last through the winter; a place to keep the hay dry for the herd; to keep the farm equipment out of the elements; to give the animals a place to have shelter and to keep warm during the cold winter months.

Maybe it’s because the American flag epitomizes the mind-boggling work and sacrifice that it took to grow this nation when, as one symbolic star after another was added to our banner, Americans labored to stitch one territory after another into a union of fifty United States unlike that of any other.

For me, that is the linkage between barns and the American flag:  each represents work, sacrifice, perseverance, personal utility, courage, and the pursuit of a common goal. 

The immigrants who founded this country on the east coast, followed by those who then pushed south and west to establish an agrarian society that eventually grew into a manufacturing and economic behemoth encapsulated those personal characteristics.

The process wasn’t perfect and a lot of serious mistakes were made.  But, despite the pessimism of naysayers, the result turned out better than anything that the world had seen before. That is why the flood of new entrants continues.

Yet I wonder if the values represented by Old Glory have not somehow become diluted by an altered American lifestyle that seems to have trended heavily towards unearned privilege for some and governmental dependency for others.

A local display of American pride, Center Harbor, NH.

Poetry contains the ability to express in a few lines of stanza what might otherwise take pages to articulate:  The English poet William Wordsworth once wrote,

“My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,

As if life’s business were a summer mood;

As if all needed things would come unsought…

But how can [a person] expect that others should

Build for him, sow for him, and at his call

Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?”

John F. Kennedy expressed similar sentiments just as pithily when, in his inaugural address, he intoned in his heavy New England accent:

“And so, my fellow Americans,

Ask not what your country can do for you;

Ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy immediately followed up with,

“My fellow citizens of the world,

Ask not what America will do for you,

But what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

When my dad entered America as a young immigrant in the early 1900’s, he came with nothing but the desire and ability to work, to raise a family and to hold it all together.  He and my mom endured economic conditions that make today’s national and state debacles pale in comparison. 

Unlike Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, Dad & Mom didn’t need to write a thesis to understand the Great Depression.  They lived it. 

Just as you love America, dear readers, so do I.  But there are takers, and there are givers.  Just ask any returning American soldier.  Let’s not permit the takers to become the majority.

Happy Birthday, America!