What If I Am Glad To Be Here?

What If I’m Glad To Be Here?

     Please don’t tune me out when I say he’s name.  I remember a State of the Union Address when President Trump inspired me.  He talked, he directed those assembled to the attention which he wanted to shine the spotlight upon.  Those in the balcony, in various appropriate attire, as the Commander in Chief of the United States of Amerca told their stories.  What honor!  I watched.

     He lifted up and recognized the ones who had done remarkable things.  Things that demanded self-sacrifice and the very thread America was woven with.  He drew all these stories back to our forefathers.  Somehow his speech, which was more than rhetoric and amen answers, sparked a pride in me but not in the wrong way.

     I have been to Germany.  In Italy, I served as we dropped bombs to protect those who could not protect themselves.  I had flown the “pond” of the Atlantic a couple times after kissing the Med in a great city called Venice.  I had seen good in these countries.  Were they the best?  No, not for me.

     That awareness brought me to Mr. Trump’s words.  Was America the best nation?  No, but it was the best one for me.  With help of my wife, I was brought back to America after an Air Force service oversees.  Thankfully, I landed in Omaha, Nebraska, a land which was closely familiar to me.  Its sights, its smells, and its usual mundane things of black dirt and creeks with its usual wildlife I had grown up with.  I had a reorientation getting me back to American soil.  You see, I had to get my head on straight before I could pick up my new civilian life and lead my growing family. 

     Mr. Trump’s speech some years later confronted my embarrassment of being called an “American.”  A noisy American at that.  The running joke among servicemembers overseas was if we wanted to pick out Americans, notice the loud ones at the international airports.  In Germany and Italy, I felt to be the intruder.  I was the foreigner having little regard for their hundred of years of traditions making their countries rich in pride.  What was I to know?  America was about two-hundred years young.  We built with sticks and sheetrock while Germans put up concrete block to last another four-hundred years.  And that was just the downtown market area!  Those people had something to lose.  Talk about roots.  Talk about inflexibility.

     A certain stagnation I became aware of as these gridlocked nations held close their inherited cultures.  Traditions are good.  Especially in the church.  Such fly-by-night ideas should not streak across the sky to the observers crying out, “Squirrel!”  But in this grand country of ours, we formulated silly putty.  As applied to the picture, we could pick up the image.  From other nations we could learn.  With a great influx of immigrants, America has become the great testing ground.  Not of our original governmental structure, but of new ideas flooding across our borders in legal migration every day.  So in Amerca, I found something to be proud of (again in a good way.)

     Why are we in Amerca special?  Because we go with the PLAN that WORKS!  No matter the skin color or background, who’s got the plan?  It is those ideas that we try, hammer out, and finally lift up a code.  We do this with all areas of life.  From structural buildings to families to even how the ditches are mown.  What really works?  And I believe we have found it in America.  Trial and error, and even scientifically, we apply truth to find solutions to pass on to our children, so they won’t have to reinvent the wheels.

     It is in this silly putty nation which can stretch and conform then transform, we have been given great potential.  It is my hope this physical substance of which was born over two-hundred years ago by a small group of men (supported by women), its essence will not change.  Thank you President Trump for introducing me to a people I could be grateful for.  A few years back, I counted my blessings as I finally assimilated my understanding into what I had always seen.  This nation is like no other, and does not have to be.