Encouragement

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God Bless America!
© 2006
by

Stephen A. Peterson


As a teenage, I never cared much for the 4th of July festivities. During my high school years, I dread and avoided as best I could the enthusiasm of school dances and proms with all of the posters taped up around the school, the crowning of kings and queens, and the homecoming parades especially. It all seemed so unnecessary and a waste of time!

But the other day unknown to most people in Iraq and Americans abroad, a couple celebrated forty years of marriage to each other in a land struggling to be free! They had survived the Saddam Hussein reign of terror several wars and persistent terrorist bombings. No they were honored with a parade Iraqi style---people clapping, shouting and hoopla. “Well, how nice!” I thought. “That’s really nice!”

It took that little Iraqi town to straighten out my thinking about dances, proms and parades. How wonderful it is to live in a country so free that people may freely choose to participate or not participate in the celebration of a school homecoming parade, 4th of July (the nation of the United State’s birthday) or a wedding—to honor whom they please, even that battered but still vigorous institution of marriage! Is a parade, dance or prom necessary? Of course not. In both the United States and in Iraq it is an outstanding example of the enthusiastic and indomitable example of the human spirit to be free. This spirit IS the spirit upon which the United States was founded under God for 230 years now. A spirit the majority of Iraqi citizens long for after knowing what it is like living in fear, insecurity and terror for more than 30 years.

The 4th of July is a great day for parades, fireworks and celebration all across the United States of America. It is this writer’s hope that all the bands are out, that there are parades in every American city, town and in the rural communities with a plethora of floats, and that—flying high over all—the red, white and blue of Old Glory waving across the nation from the mountains to the prairie to the oceans of America! That Americans of every race, ethnic group, religion and gender come to realize and understand that the brave American service members serving all over the globe do voluntarily. So that America remains the land of the free because of the brave!

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