“A Place to Remember . . .”

Photo Credit, Bergeron Images

The title of this post appears as the heading on a plaque affixed to a steel beam recovered after the World Trade Towers came crashing down fifteen years ago in New York City . . .

. . . “A tribute to life, lives lost and lives changed forever, September 11, 2001” is the accompanying sentiment. 

 

It is a day of infamy forever burnished into the American consciousness by a covert attack from a band of hate-filled Jihadists emanating in the Middle East.

This memorial stands in Dunham Park, in the Liberty Corner Section of Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Standing on that venerable, memory-filled steel beam are two American flags below which rests a fresh bouquet of flowers. 

 

Both were placed on the beam in memory of the innocent victims from this area of New Jersey who perished in that disgraceful attack.

A Superb Public Servant Decides to Step Down

Elected officials are a variegated lot.  Some do well. Some do poorly.  I have seen them come.  I have seen them go.  And then, there are those who seem to want to hang onto their posts as if for dear life.

 

Dr. Mathur at last night's Board of Education meeting.

However, there are other types, some, who, with a large dose of common sense and wisdom, choose to exercise what I term “walkaway power.”

It’s what a person will do when the recognition sets in that it is time to move on.  You have made your contribution, you have accomplished your job, you are satisfied with your achievements.  In the end, you realize that your energies need to be focused in another direction.

Such, in my opinion, is the rationale behind the decision that Arvind Mathur employed when, after eleven years in office, he decided not to seek another three-year term to the Bridgewater-Raritan Regional School District.

I’ve known Dr. Mathur from the time that he first called me years ago to comment upon a blog post that I wrote concerning American values.  Something about his reading of that short essay resonated with him and, during our conversation, a bond set in.

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.

Post-Thanksgiving Gratitude

O

ver the centuries, Thanksgiving has gradually become America’s official we-are-lucky-to-be-where-we-are-and-what-we-are-today celebration.  There are millions of reasons – literally – for this exceptional phenomenon. Yet those reasons come packaged in so many combinations and permutations that it would take a Cray supercomputer to calculate their number and composition.

If this sounds like hyperbole, consider this:  Where else in the world in the last 400 years have so many people gravitated?  Yes, we have shortcomings; plenty of them – both individually and as a nation – but where else have so many of the world’s wretched come for relief and for an opportunity to start over again?

The answers are self-evident and need no further articulation.  Everybody on this globe knows where in the Western Hemisphere lies that great land of freedom nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

Enormous problems confront America today: 

There is the comatose economy, much of it brought on by our own man-made internal political intransigencies. 

There is that seemingly never-ending war on two fronts – one being waged in the open, the other largely clandestine – in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and we are opening a third front in Yemen to choke out the roots of radical Islamic Jihad.  

Within our own boundaries we are getting besieged by a similar home-grown terrorist threat conceived by organized cells or by lone American citizens with problematic allegiance, motivated by the same ideology.

Despite those daunting challenges, it’s still a good time to count not only our individual blessings, but also our national ones.  I remain an optimist about the U.S. and am – most of all – grateful that it welcomed my mom and dad from our friendly neighbor to the north.

I know what it means to be a first-generation immigrant whose parents labored under the most dreadful of economic conditions – worse than those of today – as they raised a family whose offspring sought education, employment and opportunity. 

Somehow, we pulled through; and we never looked back. 

Thanks America.  We love you.