Thoughts on a Sunday

I have been kicking around my apartment since I returned from Church and a quick run to Bristol Farm for supplies. And oustide my apartment because the gloom of June ended earlier today and there was sunshine to enjoy. So me and Ellwood shared a sandwich (don't feed cheese to a toothless cat parenthetically. It gets stuck on the room of the mouth) and I made an entry in my private journal while the breeze meandered about me.

This morning, lying in bed just awakened, I thought suddenly about a bronze coin a friend gave me, a memento of hers or someone she knew from the Bicentennial of 1976. I was suddenly cognizant of just how young this country is and how I, probably we, never really consider that the events we treat as ancient history are really adjacent to our own. I remember standing on a Bronx roof, courtesy of one of my late uncles, that overlooked the Hudson, watching the tall ships sailing up in one of the commemorations. I had lived already, 22 years of that 200 years since the founding of our country. I have now lived 56 years of the 234 years since the founding of our county. Not that many generations separate me from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the beginning of the great American Experiment.

Or separate any of us in the fifty states from that delicate balance which is Democracy in America. And yet we treat her, America, as if we can say or do anything without damage to the core values. We treat her, in fact, as if those core values mean nothing, and can be rearranged wily nilly. Or worse, we treat her, as if those core values should be eradicated in favor of those kinds which we have seen if only we remembered destroy the rights of man using deceptive self-aggrandizing rhetoric. I think perhaps Daniel Webster was more astute at discerning the rhetoric of the Devil than we the people have been of late. This country is young and it hasn't taken sufficient root for us to assume that the values of the Founding Fathers, which are by the way under vicious and alas even smug attack, will survive. Without the values there is no America, despite the appeals to their irrelevancy. And some of those appeals are from our own representatives, who refuse to listen to their constituencies about key issues. Even mock those constituencies in an early expression of government despotism.

We haven't been around so long that we can afford to think ourselves indestructible. Countries and empires with far more years under their territorial belts, died writhing deaths, as did their citizens, failing to heed the lessons of history.

I don't know. I don't know why I was thinking about this stuff in my bed on a Sunday in June. But I actually got a littled chilled to think that so little time in the past, a group of adventurous, thoughtful men (and it's ok with me that it was mostly men since that was the society of the time, foward thinking, but still with the frailty of humanity) were birthing something so magnificent that we might let die because of our negligence or wilfullness. Worse because of our ignorance of the value of what we have had.