The Ole' Apothecary

Call me a jingo, a chauvinist, an Archie Bunker, a nationalist, a flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it super-patriot. I am all of those things, and proud of it.   In Afghanistan, people eat grass for breakfast.  In China, people can only have one baby per family.  In the Zaire version of the Congo, women are raped wholesale.  In much of Southwest Asia, women are the property of their husbands and must hide their faces and bodies.  Poverty and tyranny rule much of the world.  But here, despite the flaws we try to measure with a cracked ruler of political correctness, we are, nevertheless,  at liberty: to become, to grow, and to have.  The protection of our Constitution is celebrated in Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms:  of speech, of religion, from want, from fear. These freedoms are on my bedroom wall, in the form of Norman Rockwell's painted representations of each.  Okay, Rockwell is no Jackson Pollack, but, to me, Pollack was no more of an artist than pollock is crabmeat.

Our government runs a lottery periodically.  No, not the lottery for mega-millions of dollars, but for something far more precious in the world and in the world's history. They hold a lottery for the right to live here. In other words, the chance to become a citizen of the United States of America is something that some people regard, literally, as a prize to be won.  Should that not move those of us who won that prize in our birthday suits to cherish it all the more?  Isn't that another truth we should hold to be  self-evident?

Go ahead and throw some P.C. muck in my face; I am expecting it.   This is my safe celebration of the fourth of July in my Texas county, where an historic drought has caused the sale of fireworks to be banned.  I launch some rockets' red glare with words, and will continue to do so.  God stand beside her and guide her!