Saturday, July 01, 2017

Reflect on the Fourth



Midsummer celebration of July 4, was casual and scattered in my hometown in my early years.

Fireworks were bootlegged and I don't remember parades after my uncle Roy Wilson died because he was the closest I came to World War I (Except that I was born just seven years after it--- and just 60 years after "THE WAH" between the states.) 

But in my family,, the first concept I had of July 4 was my grandfather describing a packed room of men in Philadelphia in 1776 (which might as well have been 1500 B.C.E. in my head. The way Vick told it, this was a collection of fairly literate gentlemen who were ready to fight their King for their personal and private "rights"s as well as their constitutional and international "Liberty". 

He mixed a metaphor so to speak because he characterized their collective sentiments as being the same as the indomitable Scot Richard Rumbold, who said just before he was hanged:

"I could never believe that some men were born Saturday and bridled and other men born booted and spurred to ride them..."

So I didn't have a desperate "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition" feeling about the fourth as a child, that others absorbed. When I first saw James Montgomery Flagg's depiction of Uncle Sam, it excited me somewhat because it was so portrait- like.

I think it was my teacher Miss Berta McCurdy who told me that the original Uncle Sam was a New York businessman who sold beef to the Navy during the war of 1812 and all of the boxes were stamped U.S, and the Navvies christened him "Uncle Sam". 
                                               

                                        
We have always enjoyed fireworks and look forward to barbecue, especially after we learned not to use tomato essence on the cooking meat and to take it slow and easy starting out with hot ashes and ending up hours later with coals.  Homebrew almost frozen made the hours slide by.

An important point about July 4 is one my father-in-law  Ralph Pierce laid down: "Never buy or consume watermelon until after the Fourth !"

It shreds my soul and drowns my eyes when I know that somewhere in the United States on the fourth of July, someone will damage or destroy an American flag. There will be some selfish dystopian  oaf who will sit or lie on his belly and close his eyes during the Pledge of Allegiance.

I can't do anything about that. It will all grind down exceeding fine for them in the end.

It is for us the quick and living who feel safer and more free because of those gallant men who offered, on history's altar their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" in defines of tyranny, for us.  

Maybe, remembering, we can accept the debates that fuel the glue factory of legislatures, with the empirical evidence that Uncle Sam is the symbol for the longest surviving Republic and the most senior written and published Declaration of Independence and Constitution on this planet.

We do  not make this a priority  nowadays the way my Granddaddy did.   Who is going to value and salvage  America's tomorrows ?

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