Happy Independence Day

Happy Independence Day to you! The opening picture was the fireworks on the Chesapeake Bay last night behind our house enjoyed from our deck overlooking the water.

 I hope you have today off  to spend time with your friends and family. It has been raining  on and off for several days now, and my office staff told me how it had been raining the entire week we were in Jackson Hole. The sky is blue and it is sunny and humid now in Chesapeake Beach. I hope you have good weather wherever you are today.

 Somehow, the evening rain stopped just in time for the fireworks show last night.  Chesapeake Beach is a very small and charming town in Southern Maryland. It is located in Calvert County, only a few blocks from Ann Arundel County.  Unlike Potomac or Bethesda, there are only a few small restaurants and a local grocery store or two. We live across from a water park, one of the main entertainment venues for this very quaint town in the summer. 

We love this little fishing village, where you can safely leave your door open , walk or run alone on quiet streets without having to worry that something dangerous will happen to you. This is the advantage of living in a small town. Also, not having to cross that busy Bay Bridge in the summer, to us, is another enormous advantage of having a place or visiting Chesapeake Beach.  My husband would tell you how impatient I am with busy traffic!

On Independence Day, the towns of North Beach (half a mile down the road) and Chesapeake Beach are full of red, white and blue. American flags are everywhere on people’s front porches, flower pots and decks. I love that feeling of patriotism. It is one of the holidays that reminds me that I am proud to be an American.

As David and I took our usual run and walk through the two boardwalks (one boardwalk belongs to North Beach, the other to Chesapeake Beach), we chatted about how free we feel to be in this great country. Sure, there are problems with our society, as in all  modern societies, but we are well aware that we are blessed in so many ways.

 Many of our politicians try to tell us how the gap between the rich and poor is widening, and there is much truth in that, but we each have to maintain our perspective. How poor are we, as compared to the rest of the world’s citizens? Have we seen children waiting patiently outside a restaurant for us to finish our meal and, before we got up to walk out, they would rush over to ask if they can have our leftover broth?  Our family has definitely seen such children, for example, in Vietnam!

Have we seen a child standing patiently to fill his or her water bucket at a public faucet, a malfunctioning faucet with water dripping out drop by drop, on an extremely hot, humid summer day, as David’s father told us he witnessed in India? Have we seen people cooking, washing and bathing in the river of their villages?  Go to a third world country and you will see these scenes everywhere.

I do not belittle the problem of poverty in our country, but perspective is everything. When we  are “down and out” in the United States, we still can get help from multiple social agencies, no matter how little that help might be. There are many places in the world where one would be lucky to eat anything two or three days a week. Many countries do not have homeless shelters or government financial aids. When our politicians fight with each other , we have to keep in mind they are fighting over the differences of their philosophy of how to help the poor. Neither party wants to let the poor perish, although that might not be clear through all their rhetoric. As a matter of fact, I often find it amusing that all the politicians try to identify themselves with “the middle class” while they are campaigning, then they take fancy trips abroad that cost the tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars a year,  the exact money that could have been used to help the middle or lower classes. It is unfortunate that these politicians, to promote their own agenda, are not aware that they are causing the deep division between different types of people and classes within society, causing even more resentment between the “haves” and the “have nots”. Unity as a society would promote a more healthy environment to solve social problems.

On this Independence Day, we should cherish our state of democracy which, most days, is a very peaceful existence. At this very moment, we are witnessing the transition in Egypt just as we witnessed its transition a short year ago. This transition came amid chaos for weeks and weeks, as we probably will see in Syria. We heard of the unfortunate Jewish American young man who was stabbed to death in the streets of Egypt while watching the protesters. He grew up in Bethesda and was a compassionate worldly young man. We have been watching in horror the chaos for months in Syria and the suppression in N. Korea and numerous other areas across the globe.  We should be grateful  and give thanks for  our peace, freedom and independence. Our children need to learn that freedom indeed is not free and cannot to be taken for granted.

Enjoy this beautiful day!

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