Welcome!

When I was a kid it was a point of national pride that we were each one different yet all Americans. Sure, we didn’t practice that belief the way it’s now understood, but it was constantly preached and  reaffirmed as correct, as the ultimately right stuff.  In the course of my lifetime this purportedly universal and fundamental belief has been the cause of a constant intra-us struggle to either make or keep equality from becoming not just the law but also the reality of this land. Thus the moment was just that powerful, watching fireworks from the stands of the The Richmond County Bank Ballpark, home of the Staten Island Yankees, surrounded by the great variety of folks who make up lower middle class New York City. Ooh-ing and aah-ing in unconscious unison, we were for that moment one despite our differences.

As the last explosion echoed off into New York Harbor and the harmony of the moment passed in favor of the home-bound rush, my mind settled on other moments, those before and those to come in our period of conflict renewed.  In 1863 Abraham Lincoln spoke:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent,

a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that

all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war,

testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated,

can long endure…

…It is for us the living…to be dedicated here to the unfinished work

which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 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, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Whatever your cause this coming Independence Day, let it be in harmony with your values and not your fears.