March

America is a parade.  This idea marched into my mind a few weeks ago while sitting along a street in Herrick, Illinois. My family and I, along with a few hundred other people enjoying the pleasant July morning, were lined up to watch the town’s annual Independence Day parade.

 We watched fire departments roll slowly by in their giant red machines.  We watched the war veterans march stoically while the young boy scouts stepped lightly to a cadence inaudible to grown-up ears.  We watched the politicians shake hands and the pageant queens wave.  Historic tractors chortled; classic muscle cars flexed.

America, it occurred to me, is very much a parade; a colorful, gleaming, tremendous parade, full of all kinds of people sitting atop all kinds of floats, riding all kinds of horses, driving all kinds of vehicles, all moving down the same road.

The thing about parades, though, is that no matter how long they seem to march, eventually they all end.  Before the hour is done, the sirens usually go quiet and the flashing lights are gone.

People on TV and the radio talk in great detail and often with weird enthusiasm about the decline and inevitable end of this republic.  They talk about the chaos in Iraq and the weakening of the American dollar, about the inadequacy of our institutions and the crumbling of our cities.

One thing, however, that is rarely mentioned, is the overall peculiarity of America in the first place.  Throughout much of human history, people grouped themselves almost exclusively along ethnic identity.  That is one reason we see so much turmoil in places like Iraq.  It is not that the vast majority of Shiite’s or Sunnis or Kurds are inherently bad or crazy.  The intense violence is due partly to the fact that for much of their history, the concept of voluntarily sharing a prize of land defined by often arbitrary and even foreign-designed boundaries was not an option.

They are a tribal people, and I can say that without fear of being called a bigot because I’ll say it about us, too.  I’ll say it about myself.  We are all a tribal people.   We like to hang out with people with whom we have something in common.  After all, even in a small town parade, the dueling candidates do not ride on the same float. 

To be fair, though, we must acknowledge that tribes have lived in semi-peaceful coexistence before 1776.  Rome, for example, kept its factions relatively inert for centuries, and our dearly departed super villain Saddam Hussein even succeeded in keeping Iraq from strangling itself, albeit by using heavy-handed techniques.

But in America, we have multiple tribes of people—and you can define the term however you would like—living together voluntarily.

Taking the long view of history, that is something of a new idea.  We aren’t living together because we’ve been conquered by an emperor we’ll never see, or because a beret-wearing dictator will torture us to death if we mess up. We are living together mostly by choice. 

Now, some might argue with that.  They might suggest, and accurately so, that the vast majority of Americans were simply born within these borders.  They might skewer the analogy and suggest that riding atop a float one has not built is not much to shout about in the first place, anyway.  These are both reasonable arguments. 

However, think about the most pompous, most vitriolic radio or TV personality you can imagine.  By listening to them blather, you would imagine they have their passports out and their luggage packed.  You might imagine, or perhaps even hope, that they are leaving the country as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

But they don’t move away to another country.

They stay.  They continue to march.

They march, because even though they might not like the people they are walking with, although they might despise the floats around them, they still think that the parade, in and of itself, is a pretty good parade.  They think the basic ideas that make up the parade route are actually pretty good, too.  They aren’t walking down the road at the end of a gun or a legion of speared soldiers. They are walking by choice. 

I think one reason we often get so upset with our elected leaders is that we carry around this misconception that equates America with its government.  The thing is, though, the President is not our parade marshal.  Congress and the Supreme Court don’t even have a float.  They are the folks walking behind the horses with the brooms.  They all can be and someday will be replaced, but the parade will remain.  The parade marches on.

            One of the first entries in Herrick’s parade was the Pana Fire Department.  Following  behind their line of dress-uniformed firefighters rolled a pickup truck, and in the back of that truck stood a frayed steel girder.  This steel came from one of the buildings destroyed during the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City.  As most of us remember, thousands of firefighters, police officers and emergency personnel chose to risk their lives that day to help save their fellow citizens.  Many of them died.

            Those men from Pana chose to be firefighters.  They volunteer to risk their lives.  Less dramatically, they even chose to march in the parade.  Everyone in the parade gets that choice, because a parade, by its very nature, is voluntary.

            That is something to consider the next time we don’t like what we see around us.  All of America is that parade.  We don’t have to just sit and watch, or, like children, fight over tossed candy. 

            We can also volunteer.  We can make a float or beat a drum.  We can ride a horse, or, if we think we’re up for the challenge, try to walk behind the horses with a broom.

            America is a parade, so march. 

           

Vault

We are now more than two months into another glorious lawn mowing season.  One thing we don’t often consider, however, is that mowing lawns for profit can be a very dangerous business.  I should know. 

The year was 1991.  I was a high school freshman, fifteen and full of that adolescent, swashbuckling spirit more commonly known as dumbness.  The mowing season had just begun, and one Saturday afternoon in early May my brother and I, along with a friend, were preparing to mow our grandfather’s lawn.

Robison Brothers Yard Service, which was never an actual thing, used a set of riding lawn mowers to get the job done right.  We used our dad’s yellow and white Cub Cadet, and our grandfather’s little red Snapper.  We would start out with these riding mowers and then finish up the yard with another set of push mowers.  By that time in our pretend business, we had even begun to farm out a portion of the mowing to bored friends, enabling us to finish the job even quicker.

Our grandfather’s yard was not big.  Between the three of us it represented a little over an hour’s work.  The problem was that the Snapper was often stored at our house and was not suitable for road travel.  Instead we transported this iconic red machine from the 1970s using another noteworthy vehicle from the 1980s:  the Honda Big Red. 

The Honda Big Red three-wheeler is the best piece of technology to ever come out of Japan.  I understand that in a world utterly saturated by Japanese electronics, such a comment may sound rather stupid, but understand this:  no Nintendo gaming system ever dashed anyone across the countryside in sprints of pure whimsy, nor has any smartphone ever climbed a dirt trail so steep it would make a mountain goat cuss.  Thirty years after it came off the assembly line, I know of a Big Red that still rolls eagerly toward adventure, but I will not tell you where, because we all know that ATVs are not designed for pavement and such activity is illegal.  But I digress.

On that fateful day nearly a quarter-century ago, we loaded our grandfather’s Snapper into a small wooden trailer and then hitched that trailer onto the Big Red.  Prayers were shot up toward heaven, and away we went.

On that particular day I was driving, our friend was riding shotgun behind me, while my brother kept the Snapper secure to the trailer by physically riding on top of it.  Granted, this arrangement would not have passed OSHA regulations, but we were in a hurry and it seemed entirely reasonable at the time.  Was the mower strapped to the trailer?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  Many moons have shone down upon many adolescent fools since that fateful day, and such specifics are now lost somewhere in the gravel-pocked road rash of time.

From our house to Grandpa’s was a mere half-mile trek, past the power station and then down a gentle hill about the length of a football field.  Puttering toward the job site at an unhealthy clip, we just about made it to the 90-yard line.

I would like to say that what happened next came without warning, but that would be a tremendous lie.  In the “Road Warrior” world of mid-1980s ATV standards, the guy sitting shotgun had the job of basically being the rear-view mirror.

“Slow down, Josh.”  The rear-view mirror said.  “Seriously, you’re going too fast!  SLOW DOWN!”

I would also like to say that I was paying too close attention to the road in front of me to have any memory of the disaster unfolding behind us at 30 miles per hour.  However, that is also not the case.  Due to a sad combination of poor towing decisions and asinine driving skills, the pin connecting the hitch to the three-wheeler came loose and shot off into space.  For a very short while afterwards, the hitch itself, probably due to tremendous inertia, bounced along the road.

But when it stuck, it stuck.  Hard.  The mower, abiding by each and every one of Newton’s laws of motion, catapulted out of the trailer like a post-apocalyptic siege weapon.    No effort was ever made to repair what no longer even looked like a lawn mower, to a machine that ended its days in perhaps the most violent lawn-related spectacle in Illinois history.

As for my brother, thank God he somehow cleared himself of the missile before it exploded onto the road.  He basically skidded on his backside and then somehow popped up running like a terminator robot.  Too shell shocked to try and kill me—which any jury would have deemed justifiable homicide—he instead began to scream that he was not about to mow anymore that day.  I did not argue.

With adrenaline surging through his body and most of our grandmother’s first aid focused on his shredded backside, it wasn’t until later that evening he noticed his thumb throbbing.  The next day a doctor confirmed a broken bone and insisted he forgo the rest of his seventh-grade track season.

This embarrassing story ends the only way it could end and still be written about by the guy who caused it.  A few weeks later my brother went to the junior high state track meet and competed in the pole vault.  He won.  He brought back one of Brownstown’s only state championship medals—ever—with a cast on this thumb and a swagger to his walk.  His thumb still moves kind of weird, but glory is glory and that is that.

          So take heed, young lawn mowers of today.  You don’t have to be texting to shatter metal and bone.  
          Sometimes all it takes is a few bad ideas rolling down a hill.