America: ready, set, gone

If one travels the southwest States of California, Arizona, and New Mexico along the I-10 corridor, they’ll find a landscape barren. Miles stretch into miles of seemingly endless nothing, where the rearview mirror allows a shrinking of what looms large in the windshield. What’s in front quickly becomes history behind as the odometer changes. Most travelers just want to get through, hoping to come upon scenery more inclined to beauty. Yet, if one drives into Texas, things only get worse, or better, depending.

Except, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and those in their haste to get through miss beauty unparalleled. A vast area of desert, mountains, pucker bushes, cacti, and Ponderosa pines, where three nations fought for generations to claim ownership of, especially for the miniscule water available, yet in the end, one prevailed. The remnants of battles large and small, scattered throughout, and very few of anyone today ever stops to take in what others died to obtain. The desire to just get through, more important than a desire to see, learn, or understand. One slice of a nation, vast in every aspect of its history, topography, and people.

In youth I was mesmerized by these stretches of highway, growing up in a family that lived a transient life, like Bedouins, absorbing the scenery as mile after mile stretched by. My parents always drove a station-wagon and being on the middle lower rung of the sibling scale, I was forced to ride in the back, looking back, the landscape, like history, always shrinking. I loved the travels and believed the life I lived in youth was the same for everyone.

I watched television for the first time when I was a little older than five. Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, and the Cisco Kid, to me, embodied americana. And Superman – Truth, Justice, and the American way! How could the country I grew up believing be anything but good? Mom was a great cook, especially lasagna and spaghetti. She taught me I was American … and Catholic was my heritage. I thought everybody was. I was a teenager before I ever had “fast-food,” aside from daily peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And don’t laugh, I grew up in the two greatest time periods in America, the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Innovation, and ingenuity were advancing at a rate unequaled, while the nation teetered at the fulcrum point of balance. That was until government decided to push the envelope and start the beginning of the end of the country in the early mid-sixties. I neither knew nor understood any of this, being too young and lost in my world of seclusion, happy that everything was well. Then I learned intent:

September of ’68, Honda introduced the Mini-Trail 50. I wanted one but the intended market was adults. All the advertising was geared to the adult market. In retrospect, Honda missed the advertising mark, but they still sold hundreds of thousands over the years to adults who in turn presented them to their kids. The bike quickly evolved from a street look to pure dirt within a couple model changes. A win-win, but original intent? In my youth, I would never own one, but when I was ten, I spent two days riding one.

Fast forward to present day. Honda introduces the Monkey. An updated look-alike of the Mini-Trail, so close in looks, I take the bait. A history-repeating-history re-vision, only different. Riding, I may look like a monkey on a Monkey, but the feeling of being ten and the joy of riding what I could never own then, but now do; priceless! With intent fulfilled, an aside to follow beside. The bike, equipped with ABS – antilock brake system – for the front wheel. The original, simple, the modern, more complex, replete with everything required for street riding, including an idiot light for the ABS, and owner’s manual, but who needs one. Apparently, I didn’t understand the light. Now I do after reading what I didn’t know then but do now.

The point, metaphorically speaking; I wonder how many people believe in the greatness of America, or understand the current agenda presented to destroy what others built to provide. To truly understand having been born in a nation that wasn’t supposed to be but became. David versus Goliath, when the underdog prevailed, the world stuttered in surprise, and the rest as they say is history. Only it wasn’t, even though it is, inclusive of man’s propensity to align, or misalign for self-power, thereby repeating events, becoming cyclical. And those who don’t bother to learn, or understand, or willingly surrender, will lose what others valiantly fought to provide. For those who initially gave, was the cost worth the price, when even the government doesn’t believe in the nation anymore, representative of the vitriol espoused by legislators to change the system, the nation, the history. We have two founding documents, and one Bill of Rights enshrined in the National Archives for all to behold. Yet, it now appears agenda is replacing what others died to give. A national crisis the nation hasn’t faced since the Civil War: death from within.

And as events unfold, I wonder how many people even remotely understand the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and Constitution. I’m told most do. If so, then how can the nation stand where it does? Like the Monkey’s owner’s manual, Americans have the Federalist Papers, but in all the commotion today to change, I believe no one cares anymore to understand the intent of freedom for each to pursue their dreams. Or has intent become forced change to deceive. Even Thomas Paine, who today would be considered an ardent liberal, understood the foundational concept required for the whole to stand:

There is a single idea, which if it strikes rightly upon the mind, either in a legal or a religious sense, will prevent any man or any body of men, or any government … that before any human institutions of government were known in the world, there existed, if I may so express it, a compact between God and Man … and that as the relation and condition which man in his INDIVIDUAL PERSON stands in towards his Maker cannot be changed by any human laws or human authority, that religious devotion, which is a part of this compact, cannot so much as be made a subject of human laws; and that all laws must conform themselves to this prior existing compact, and not assume to make the compact conform to the laws, which, besides being human are subsequent thereto.

WE THE PEOPLE are in trouble. When government removes, changes, or rewrites its own history to change the course of history, buyer beware. Additionally, when agitators, desirous of wholesale overhaul, inflict destruction, and legislators not only endorse, but promote, somethings amiss. On a visit to Washington D.C. in 2015, we visited the American History Museum. Having been occasional regulars, the displays presented that day reflected a history the antithesis of truth. In Ford’s Theatre, the same changes had taken place. Speaking with a park Ranger, his words still resonate – “We [government] felt the American people were too stupid to see the exhibits [read the placards] and return home to study further. We [government] decided to present the narrative we wanted visitors to believe.” As Honda originally missed intent, but agenda prevailed, WE THE PEOPLE better learn and understand intent before agenda prevails.

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