The Trunk has been eloquent

The Trunk has been eloquent as usual. My thoughts this week have been more mundane, I’m afraid. We went to a 4th of July parade in a small town (considered here a big town) in South Dakota. People said it was the biggest 4th of July parade ever. That reflects the rate of citizen participation; anyone who wants to enter the parade can do so with minimal, if any, pretext required. (My wife said, “I never knew a 1992 Oldsmobile was considered a classic car.”) The parade included the municipal band, some Shriners on motorbikes, lots of veterans, two anti-abortion floats (I notice you never see pro-abortion floats in parades), four or five Christian floats of various kinds, a float with some cheerleaders having a ten-year reunion, a line of old-fashioned tractors a block or two long, and several politicians shaking hands and passing out stickers. Not a liberal sentiment in sight, but some of the politicians were Democrats. I can only imagine how they feel about campaigning in this environment. But they grit their teeth and do it, often successfully. Then last night we had fireworks by a local lake. We stopped in a warehouse-sized store that sells every imaginable kind of firework and bought, among other things, twelve dozen bottle rockets and a reloadable mortar. The mortar fires shells into the sky, where they explode. It enables consumers to put on the same kind of display that municipalities do. We bought a 24-shot package and put on a good show. As it got dark, we could see similar displays going off all around the lake. Everyone said they had never seen so many fireworks on the 4th. Then we came home and were relieved to see that there had been no major terrorist attacks. I was humming “God Bless America” on and off all day. Last night my five year old daughter heard me and said, “I don’t know any of the words to that song except ‘God bless America, land that I love.'” I told her that was enough.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses