A birthday celebration is on the horizon. It will come with great simplicity, but with frenetic clangs, claps, bangs, booms, bleats, blats, a possible pipe and drum unit, and lots of burgers, brews and flies. Silks and frocks in all their glory will fly in joy.
Hello to the Fourth of July. It is a celebration of independence — the independence to live without shackles or the caprices of a cranky sovereign. Honored are the courageous of 250 years ago who did speak truth to the naked avarice and grandiloquent pomposity of the feeble-minded fools.
It is a salute to the common people, the ones who look after neighbors. It is a salute to envy being replaced with love for the values shared and joy for the new ideas those values bring. And it is also a salute to the unwavering, steadfast nurses doctors, firefighters and responders putting themselves to the defense of all, trying to make the day a bit better.
As the sun leaves the day, I give a special moment of thought for the team on the dialysis units. They take a moment of dark to light a small sparkler as a beacon of hope. No hope can exist without some darkness. Dark is their nether task, filtering the poisons and piths of life. Yet they console and cheer each bit of simple progress to help people stay alive within the community, helping with tireless example to offer one more drop of joy and light for a few more precious days.
A deep debt of gratitude for those efforts and a solemn pledge to pay tribute to those who have gone before us in order that we may have a more perfect union with the joy of living life.
Happy Birthday, America.
Orpheus Allison is a photojournalist in The County who graduated from UMPI and earned a master of liberal arts degree from the University of North Carolina. He began his journalism career at WAGM television, worked around the U.S., and later changed careers and taught in China and Korea.
