Photo by Mike Hessong
It was a very special day in Port O’Connor, and we were bursting at the seams with guests and locals alike. Fireworks, firemen’s barbeque, fishing and fun were all in the mix.
Americans celebrate the birth of their independent nation in a big way. Still we should never lose sight of the cost of that independence. Each firecracker popped, every sparkler that twinkled and every rocket that flashed was the visual reminder of generations of sacrificial, selfless and giving free thinkers that made our current America so strong.
It is not just generations of soldiers who from the time of the Revolutionary War fought and died to achieve and preserve our freedom, but so much more. There are innumerable immigrant families, slaves, bond servants and individuals who gave up all for the hope of a dream. Many gave all but their very lives to build a dream that seemed beyond belief. Some made a huge success of their gamble, but more were simple people with humble dreams for a life of more. There are settlers and pioneers whose inexhaustible efforts to claim a sliver of dreamland for their own braved struggles they could not even imagine. Many of them found a dreamland was limited and required maximum effort, and yet they labored on. There are entrepreneurs, inventors, industrialists, inventors, capitalists, businessmen and women, rebels, reformists, radicals and revolutionaries who ;labored to build what sometimes only they could envision, and many received scant recompense for their efforts. Annals of Americans stood up, stood against, stood for and stood behind the change or growth or reform that laid claim to their lives and dreams. While we do not agree with them all, do not support every cause or effort, we have a duty to preserve and continue the core of that quintessential American dream. We are a land where on July 4th and every day we support and defend the right of Americans to be rugged individualists, free thinkers, reformers, mavericks, rebels and free spirits. Their history and legacy is impressive and awesome. So whether encouraging our children to set their own course, helping our community to map their own future, or even fighting to replot or reform a wrong turn in our society’s direction; we come from a long line of eccentrics, oddballs and individualists who dared to believe that one voice matters, one man’s effort counts, one woman can make a difference, and even a child can impact the future. So take time amid the potato salad and wet swimsuits, smoke bombs and bottle rockets to remember and pass on the living legacy that is America! Never lose sight of the fact that most of what makes us great, special, exceptional and extraordinary was strongly thought to be weird, wrong, peculiar, bizarre, uncanny, unpopular and abnormal by few or many at one or more points in history. The real story of July 4th is in celebrating the amazing abnormal, the atypical awesomeness, the amazing anomalous that made America! Happy Independence Day!
Photo by Mike Hessong
