Every Fourth of July, my grandparents host a breakfast and Independence Day program for all their children and grandchildren who live close by. Growing up, I always viewed it as a simple excuse to fill up on delicious, Grandma-made goodness and goof around with the cousins. As I got older, though, I came to realize that what the morning’s festivities really represented were an opportunity for Grandma and Grandpa Marchant to pass on some of the wisdom and love of country that have helped to make their lives so fulfilling.
The proceedings are typically very simple. A few of the grandsons will raise Old Glory on the flagpole, someone will lead the family in prayer, and we’ll dig in to our pancakes, bacon and biscuits. Once everyone has pretty well eaten their fill, Grandpa will stand up and begin delivering his spiel. Thankfully, I’ve come to appreciate the speech for more than the sales pitch to the rising generation I once took it to be.
My grandfather is an old cowboy who spent his childhood running cattle in Utah’s Wasatch range. He’s all but impervious to pain, too stubborn to admit his own weaknesses, and, frankly, tough as they come. Yet when it comes to matters of God, family and country, he turns into a big softie.
His father served in France in World War I, and Grandpa himself served in the Army in the early ‘60s. To hear him tell it, though, his deep-seated sense of patriotism was put there to stay by his mother-in-law, my great-grandmother, who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany just as Hitler was rising to power. Grandma Schumann, who passed away when I was 21 (I wish everyone could know at least one of their great-grandparents.), loved America and the English language with a fervor I’ve never seen in anyone else.
Grandma Schumann especially loved Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which she dubbed “the greatest assemblage of words in the English language.” Every Fourth of July, her son-in-law reminds his progeny of how precious, even sacred, the fundamental ideals of America are. Then he recites, from memory and to the letter, that sacred assemblage of words. He generally chokes up somewhere between “in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground” and “the world…can never forget what they did here.” By the time he hits “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” four or five full-fledged tears are sitting there on his cheeks.
I don’t think I can ever fully appreciate what those who have gone before me have given to build up all the blessings I enjoy in my 21st-century life. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the defenders of our country. I don’t ever want to go to war, but I like to think that if I was called upon to do so, I’d have the courage to answer my country’s call. I don’t, however, believe American civilians’ need to feel guilty for not having served.
Lincoln said, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.”
He was, of course, talking about the work of winning the Civil War and preserving the Union. But the words should ring true for each of us today. “That cause” is the pursuit of happiness that should be every American’s prerogative. It includes everything from fixing a busted digger link in Mecosta, Mich., to brewing a perfect cup of coffee in a hipster Seattle coffee shop. It is for us to make the world a better place, in whatever sphere of influence, great or small, we occupy.
There’s nothing more American than that.