Incendiary ‘pollution’ | Sprinkled with Humor
Published 3:41 pm Thursday, July 21, 2016
Are you disturbed by the current political climate? I am.
Our morals seem to have taken a back seat to our right to freedom of speech. When did morality and our First Amendment right become diametrically opposed to one another?
As though our country wasn’t already facing scary times — terrorism abroad as well as at home, an uptick in mass shootings, increased confrontations between the police and the citizenry — we now find opposing ideological factions on the brink of drawing the country into another civil war. I have to wonder if Abraham Lincoln understood that what took us to war before would return to strip America of its peace once again. Simmering hostilities and prejudices promulgated by past generations can’t be overcome, unless future generations are allowed to form their own beliefs. Children learn from their very first role models, their parents and grandparents. They not only provide the DNA, but the examples by which their descendants go on to live their lives.
The planet on which we live is not the only thing under attack. The fiber of America, a country whose shores welcomed immigrants escaping oppression, is also wearing thin. The question of ownership weighs heavy today.
Who owns America? Those whose ancestors first claimed it for themselves? Or does it include those who came later, those still arriving, and those yet to come? Perhaps we worry that once buried, our legacy is gone forever. Or maybe it’s that we owe it to those who come after, to lay claim to all that we have now.
Real estate is important — probably the most important investment we can make. However, just as a house isn’t a home until we invest in making it our own, so too is America an empty symbol unless we maintain the principles upon which it was founded. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reminded us: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
He went on to say: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Millie Vierra lives in Issaquah.
