oh say can you see

Most everyone knows the first verse but what about the second, third, and yep- fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner. It is the anthem of this great country but what citizen of hers can recite it? Many don't know there is more than one verse. That is sad. I love the 4th verse above, it is my favorite.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

It has a new meaning to me this Independence Day. My brother is in the Army National Guard and his unit has just recently deployed to Iraq for a year. This country exists because of a few men who were willing to stand up to a government that was not treating its people with equality. It continues to exist because of free men who, despite the harsh piercing words of others choose to put their life on the line, sacrificing time, family, and pleasure to fight against those who would oppress and instill fear in those who what that same freedom.

There is plenty more to be said on this but it sufficeth me to stop here. I love this country. I love that flag. And I love those who are willing to stand up to defend the principles she was founded on.

I love you Bro. God bless you.

terrorizing the nation

Here's an idea, lets close all the national parks and cool places to visit, and see, in America because of terrorism. How much do terrorists really care about a sign that says trespassers will be liable per code 247455? If they really want to they will find a way, regardless of sign fence or security check point. As we have found out just recently with the man that tried to blow up an airplane landing in Detroit if there is a will there is a way, and they will find it. It is unfortunate but true.

In this world one person's bad decison causes ever so many others to suffer and endure greater toils in life. This is a principle that exists out of untarnished personal agency.

I understand agency but, I want my parks and historical sites back! I want to be able to visit with my kids the places I visited as a kid and learned from. Maybe some crazy person does want access to the same for evil reasons but he will find away to get that access if he wants it bad enough.

Maybe the reason is to prevent too many people from being in that vacenity, to lessen the attractiveness. I may agree with such an arguement but there again, we are not going to stop gathering at parks and sports events to prevent possible unfortunate events.

relatively oblivious

So I have lived in a bubble all my life. There are a lot of things that I take for granted and many other things I am simply unaware of. Many things I don't understand on a national level, let alone an international level. There are rules and standards that apply globally and had to be decided by somebody somewhere. I was thinking about time lines today and wonder what global committee took it upon themselves to decide how and where the world would be divided into 24 different time segments? Did some guy just decide this is how it should be and then everyone else just said there is no point in arguing it? What about the International Date Line, who picked the Pacific Ocean? Was it voted upon or did was it just that that is how it was and it worked.

After doing a little research I found that there are actually 40 different time zones around the globe, and discovered several interesting things regarding global timekeeping. One such peculiarity is that the IDL is actually de facto, drawings on maps and charts are simply the construction of the cartographers who make them. There is actually a lot to time zones and international time keeping and can get rather confusing. For example, do to a jog in the IDL there are actually 3 different days being observed for 2 hours of each one revolution of the earth. So it turns out that there is (or was) an international committee that decided on a few necessary items- the International Meridian Conference of 1884. I wonder how many people made it to this conference in 1885 or how many different countries were invited/ represented. They were the ones that decided a ‘Universal Day’ would be midnight to midnight GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and thus the start and end of this Universal Day with the IDL falls opposite this median.

Once again one little intrigue has lead to a myriad of trivial information to be regurgitated over and over in my little brain. Knowing things makes you smarter!

what if...?

What does it really matter? You read it or hear it all the time; What if…? To me what if, as far as the past is concerned, never happened so why bother with it. What if I was never born? What if my father married someone else? What if the South won the war? Sure it might be fun to think about every now and then but to me it is not a serious question. In my amateur understanding of the universe no action or event is entirely without cause or effect so to capitulate the notion of one act or event not happening is submit too that the events surrounding it must have never happened or must not have gone down the way they did, and according to the law of snowballs this can have a very serious impact. The example of “what if I was never born?” leads me to think of the classic Jimmy Stewart movie It’s a Wonderful Life. I think the movie does a nice job of capturing the complete change of an entire town in one what if. It is like a completely separate dimension. With each event building on the next in time to remove or alter one is to affect all that proceed. To ask if there would be slavery today if the South had won the Civil War, or if you could have had a chance with a girl (or boy) if you had done something a little different are not, in my opinion, accurate questions. There may be stipulations in which it is appropriate but no event, as individuals, stands alone being affected by only one thing, one instance. Furthermore, that fact is that it didn’t happen so why fret it. As said by Disney, “hakuna matata!”

canada

Where does Canada come from? We in the US of A are taught about our blessed nation and its divine origin, with its Heavenly inspired constitution, but what about our neighbors. Now it may have been during one of the many years of schooling in which I was not paying attention, for which I regret immensely, but I do not recall learning of the formation and history of our neighbor countries. Is it important? I think it is; and I am not very much in to history. I am starting to get more and more in to it but in the past I could probably care less. I regret that too. I know we (the United States) ran in to a little trouble with Mexico in our establishing our self as a nation. That I remember, but I don’t recall any thing about Canada. Perhaps I am just ignorant and every other 23 year old out there knows and paid attention in school, but I think it is important to know not only of the nation in which you live and breathe and have your freedom, but of those nations that border it. Often those bordering nations have an influence on how the one nation comes to be. What strikes me is that the America’s were a ‘new’ land in the late 1700s and people of all over Europe traveled, risking their lives, in coming here to escape religious oppression. Canada I believe was mainly French populated, right? So did the French just not like the way the “American’s” were doing things in establishing a constitution and decided to go off and make their own new nation? Did Canada battle with France as America battled with Brittan? Why was I not interested in these things in high school where I may have been taught them?