“It looks old!” Dee said staring at the length of fungus mottled, half rotted rope.
“It is old. It will hold your scrawny frame, Dee.” Joe, her father, retorted.
I was a little younger than Dee and could separate my eyes from her just long enough to notice the long claw marks in the soil beneath us. For some odd reason, Joe was extending the Mariana Trench up into the Spanish Steps with his grub grabbers. He was precariously angled in such a way that, should the rope give way, he could claw his way down. Those cerulean eyes of hers didn’t lie. She was not interested in the “hope so” language of her prognosticating progenitor.
The show of less than spectacular faith that her dear old dad displayed meant that we stayed right there for a little while longer. To this day, Guam means three things to me; great eighties music, road side fruit bat (Yigo [jee-goh]) stands, and the sound of mosquitoes reenacting Pearl Harbor on my flesh as a dozen people begged Dee to descend the rope at the Spanish Steps.
While watching a video recently, I heard a man speak of hope in this time of transition and pandemic. Hope.
It brought back the image of “mighty” Joe, engaging in impromptu landscaping while telling his daughter to, in essence, “Have faith”.
Did you catch that? Joe had hope. He hedged his bets on the able hands of a decorated Vietnam War vet and black belt in karate. He was not exactly limited in his options. Dee, on the other hand, weighed ninety pounds with her pockets full of wet beach sand. Her hands had just enough strength to support jelly bracelets and change out her Walkman cassette tapes. She had to deal with the fact that the rope looked pretty bad. She had to have faith in a ratty looking bit of cordage.
Joe’s hope was a kind gesture. Dee’s eventual venture was an act of courage and faith.
Looking forward to this new year, we see the looming probability of Joe and his hench(wo)men eating away at what is left of our economy. They will gnaw to the marrow our military. They will seek to swallow whole our freedom.
So, what should spokesmen for American exceptionalism do?
I would say that faith is walking forward with a plan. We ought to. We should structure plans to help who we can to se what is happening. We should strengthen our bonds as likeminded people and fortify those plans with cooperation and contribution amongst our friends.
What should those same spokesmen not do, in my humble opinion? We should not dig our fingers into the crumbling soil of the last hill to stand on, as we are shoved down the opposite slope, all the while pretending to trust each and every fiber of the rotten system that got us here.
Let’s call fraud for what it is. With that assessment made clear, let’s make it perfectly clear that we are in a national crisis. We aren’t “staring down the barrel of a potential crisis”. That headline was old hat four years ago. No, we are already there. We allowed it to get there. It is our problem.
Just as the socialists spent decades building this monster, it is up to us to build the mechanism of that ideology’s demise. We have to build faith in one another. That faith must be built on something other than social media posts, one liners, and chuckles at the expense of those with whom we share disagreements. We, like our fathers will have to have and exhibit real faith by…Well, allow me to quote the men that saw this coming, “ And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” It may be the last great act of a dying country or the next story of Divine Providence in a grateful country.
If you’re ever out Texas way, you look Dee in those beautiful blue eyes and tell her I said to keep the Faith.