It Was--And Is--A Good Land

Today several churches held services honoring the nation and its 233rd birthday. The preacher I heard this morning took occasion to stress how grateful we should be just to be living in “this good land”. He briefly recounted the story of his immigrant ancestors who left Italy just before Mussolini took over—and prospered very nicely in America.
I thought back on some of my ancestors who left privation in the old country and wound up as prosperous land owners in this country. It was indeed a good land, free from war, major pestilence, starvation and violent internal strife (after 1865).
One does well to take time to be grateful. Even in hard times like this, the great majority of us enjoy a lifestyle beyond the wildest imagination of literally a billion or two of our fellow humans. I’ve seen just enough of the Third World to have vivid memories of mothers who had nothing better to do with a crippled child but to drag him into the street with her and use him as a mute appeal for pity while begging for a few coins.
Or of a mob of ragged urchins surrounding anyone dressed in Western clothing, pleading with us to buy tiny packs of Chicolet gum for a couple of American pennies. I will hear their cries of “Chicolet”, “Chicolet”, “Chicolet” for the rest of my life. However bleak our circumstances appear at this moment, we all have something to be thankful for.
It’s easy to forget this in the midst of our annoyance at this or that unfortunate policy, a badly thought out war, or the failure to deal with an injustice or to right a wrong. It’s too easy to see nothing but the corruption and venality in many aspects of public life.
We are offended by the behaviors of our politicians, our clergy and our business leaders. Sometimes all we can see is the greed and the waste. It is all too easy to forget the sacrifices made by those who came before us and paved our way.
My great grandfather landed in New York with no parents. They died in the miserable, stinking hold of the ship that brought them out of Holland. Their bodies were dumped overboard with a few pious words in English that neither my great grandfather nor his siblings understood.
My preacher grandfather, on the other side of the family, was a skilled hunter until the day he died—often to the astonishment of his parishioners. When he came to Western Michigan, you didn’t just go to the store to buy meat, you hunted it. And you didn’t waste ammunition.
My other grandfather was a man about 5’7’, never over 135 pounds. In his eighties he experienced dementia and his daughter considered placing him in an institution. He didn’t like the idea, and he fought off four large, young orderlies. He won. Handily.
He got those muscles lifting bales of feed and pushing a horse drawn plow. Farming in his day was man-killing work. What hands the man had! I have his wedding ring. Two of my fingers would fit in it.
We owe these people a debt. We also owe men like my father-in-law a debt. As a teenaged sailor he lay on the bottom of his tiny infantry landing boat. He got his hands on an old World War I rifle, and he would fire up at the Kamikazes as they flew over. He told me he was scared to death, but he had to feel he was doing something to hit back.
When the last Kamikaze was destroyed his boat would motor over to a stricken ship and he would get to help scrape up the pieces of dead and wounded American sailors. Having offloaded the troops on the beach, his vessel became a sea-going ambulance.
Ambulance drivers at car wrecks today rarely see anything like the bloody chaos he had to deal with after hundreds of pounds of explosives went off. It took him forty years before he could tell anyone what he had done in the war. All anyone knew is that if a siren went off in his neighborhood after he got home, he would come downstairs screaming—looking for his battle station.
My own dad lost over a year of his life learning how to drive a tank and direct its cannon fire for a war that ended before he could get sent overseas. It took him years to recover from the financial loss that stint in the Army cost him and his family.
Millions upon millions of men—and women—lost lives, limbs, minds or just had their lives turned upside down to keep the shooting away from the rest of us. We do indeed owe them a huge debt of gratitude. July 4th is as good a time as any to remember.
Does this mean we forget the nation’s faults and blemishes and become super patriots? Please God, not. We can—and must—continue disagreeing on policies, even principles. We can legitimately be upset about things we see going on around us and in Washington.
I admit to being startled at the thrill I felt when I was in foreign parts and came around a corner and, all unexpectedly, saw the stars and stripes flying off a legation or embassy. I never want to lose that thrill.
Nor do I ever want to forget that my fathers brought me to a “good land”.