A DAY LATE
Yesterday was the Fourth of July. I spent the day in a very non celebratory fashion, doing yardwork and editing. Last week we had a tornado touch down in my neighborhood. My friends who live in Tornado Alley would scoff. “An EF-1, bah, that’s nothing.” They might say. Trees and limbs came down, power went out and the house up the street had a large tree crash through their roof. To be fair, it was small and mercifully no one was hurt.
We had two large sections of much bigger trees come down in our yard. My house was grazed, total damage; one broken window and one section of gutter mangled. It could have been much worse. It also provided me the chance to get several days of much needed exercise, cutting up the limbs with the chainsaw, dragging and hauling branches through the yard. Carrying cut wood from one end of the yard to the other. Forget Crossfit, this was a total body workout.
The nice thing about work like that is that while I have to pay attention not to delimb myself with the chainsaw, the work itself gave me time to think. I thought about the Fourth of July and America. My mother and grandparents came here after World War II, refugees from the Soviet Union by way of post war Germany. Return to the Soviet Union would have been a death sentence for my grandfather.
My mother and grandparents immigrated here in 1952 or thereabouts. After some time, my grandfather ended up working as a geologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was a job not without sacrifice, but he seemed to love it. He loved this country. He had escaped from an oppressive, totalitarian regime and ended up living in the paragon of freedom.
His love of our country imbued in me a sense of patriotism that led me to enlist at 18. In 2003 I was one of many thousands of soldiers who was deployed to Iraq. I ended up in Northern Iraq/Iraqi Kurdistan, where my team and I lived and worked with the Kurds. We were all struck by their desire to have their own, free, country. I was struck by their love of America.
Yesterday when I wasn’t cutting and stacking wood or otherwise reminding myself how badly out of shape I am, I would go inside to cool off. Sitting in front of my computer, sipping cold Gatorade, I spent a fair bit of time on Facebook. I enjoyed looking at all the photos and posts about the holiday.
Not surprisingly the content varied. My friends who served tended to post things related to sacrifice, remembering those who served and reminders that “freedom isn’t free”. My none service friends tended to post things pictures of barbecues, flags, fireworks and were generally celebratory in nature. There were a few posts here and there reminding people not to win any Darwin awards.
There were also posts from places like Minnesota and
At the Church 2003
Texas. They tended to be of the flag and barbecue variety. Pictures of men and their families, proud of driving their Cadillac’s, and Fords. Some pictures showed off real estate businesses and car dealerships with proudly waving American flags.
They were pictures of my friends from Kurdistan. The ones who had fought along side the U.S. Army. The ones who had protected my small team and I for the better part of a year. We broke bread together and lived together. The ones who opened their homes to us every holiday so we wouldn’t feel homesick. Now many of them are proud Americans, chasing and living the American dream.
I was struck that my friends, like my grandparents, and countless others before them were now Americans. They had fled despotic and often violent regimes. They came here not with a guarantee of wealth or success. They came to America with the promise that they would have a guarantee to try. A guarantee of equal treatment, the ability to practice their religion and to speak freely. That they could, with hard work have homes, and support their families without fear. That seems like a pretty good reason to take a day off, barbecue, and spend time with friends and family.