03/Aug/2007
An Editorial
Ask What You Can Do For Your Country
I don’t remember much from my junior year in high school. However, I do remember the day Ms. Corazo, my Civics teacher, told us that she would be leading a group to Washington D.C. to see President Kennedy’s inauguration. She said that we all needed to talk with our parents about it very seriously because if they could possibly afford it we really should try to go. She said it would be a trip we would remember for the rest of our lives. How right she was!
It got really cold and snowed the night before inauguration day. My feet were frozen solid in my new black penny loafers (exactly like the ones I wear today) as I stood and heard our brand new president say that we should not ask what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country. We were freezing and I was too young to get much out of the rest of what he said, but that famous line made sense to me. I remember standing there and watching him say it just as though it happened yesterday.
You know, a lot of people feel that the strength of America lies in the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, and there really is much to be said for that. I have had the opportunity to be involved with an extended first generation Vietnamese family in recent years, and watching the way those people work and prosper under our system is truly awe inspiring. I learned yesterday that the young Vietnamese family I am most familiar with is pregnant with their fourth child. It made me wonder if the next generation will make the strides their parents made and are making. If they do, one of them may well be president one day.
Immigrants have made our nation, but the other two legs of the stool are the spirit of volunteerism that pervades America that President Kennedy talked about in his first inaugural address. The Peace Corps grew in large measure from that key line in his first inaugural and Norman Rockwell did his best to illustrate the American spirit of what Rotary International calls “Service Above Self,” and it is what St. Luke says Jesus taught to a lawyer in Luke 10:25-28 about loving your neighbor as yourself.
If you think about it, volunteers made the difference in the two World Wars that resulted in the U.S. becoming the No.1 nation in the world. With only a few noteworthy exceptions, nearly all of the people who work fulltime in our nation’s churches are educated professionals who could make a lot more money doing something else.
In recent weeks we were involved in putting together the 35th Annual Kenilworth Independence Day Parade. The old timers say this year we had the biggest parade and the biggest crowd ever. I don’t know about that, but I do know it takes hundreds of volunteer hours to pull it off. Putting on a parade is no roll in the hay. Just ask the folks who do the Mardi Gras balls and parades.
The secret of doing things like that and things like local baseball, basketball, football and soccer leagues (and the city swim meet my grandchildren swam in yesterday) is that a big bunch of volunteers come together and make it happen. It’s people who take time out of the ordinary things they do in their levies and make good things happen in our town, our state and our nation. That’s how public television and WBRH stay on the air and how all of our downtown museums stay open.
No doubt about it, making money is important, and money is the oil that makes everything move, but without people who volunteer their time and work for the good of their fellow citizens, our lives would be a whole lot less fun. It’s America’s real strength, and it is what makes Americans different.
At the first meeting I ever went to about the Independence Day Parade a half dozen years ago, Parade Chairman Steve Billings said, “This parade happens every year because a large group of people come together and everyone works four or five hours.”
