About The Fourth Of July, 2005

The rockets' red glare faded into the lovely Lompoc evening sky just twelve days ago. And the more I thought about our Country's Independence Day, the more ironic the facts seem to me.

Amidst some of the most generous tax breaks for corporations and the top one percent of taxpayers, we are a nation at War. Yet we haven't heard our President talk to us of wartime sacrifices. Across the amber waves of grain, we are not growing "victory gardens" as many did in WWII.

Our Central Coast homefront families are not collecting tin foil, rationing butter or enlisting in a national effort which entails actual personal sacrifice in support of our troops overseas. Our country is without collective pain.

This war is suffered by unseen individuals. The Pentagon has outlawed any photographs of soldiers' coffins returning from the war zone.

"There will be no arrival ceremonies."

You see, it's easy to identify with our soldiers on a shallow basis. Put a ribbon sticker on your bumper to "support our troops."

On this Fourth of July, did you reflect on any hardship you willingly suffer for our uniformed men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan? Higher taxes? Higher stock prices? Gasoline at $2.67 per gallon? Perhaps you thought of the personal loss of eight grieving Central Coast families mourning dead sons.

At this time, there are 32,737 United States casualties: dead, wounded and evacuated during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Didn't realize it was that many, huh?

When the colonists declared independence from Britain, they staged a tea party, a protest against a corporation, a trading company, which dumped cheap tea on the market. The Trading Company influenced the King to slap a heavy import tax on all other tea imported to the American colonies. Jacked up the prices on everything, except the "special" tea.

Americans would not swallow it. The situation was called taxation without representation. In an ironic way, we again seem to be paying the tab for corporate interests. While the Administration talks about the global war on terrror lasting many, many years yet without any requests for personal sacrifice. The bills are coming due.

American families pay too much these days with dead sons or daughters in Middle East sands, or in corporate rip offs. Halliburton and missing millions of dollars in Iraq rebuilding funds; Enron settling with the State of California for $1.5 billion to resolve complaints that it cheated states in the West during the energy crisis of 2000 and 2001. The list goes on.

This Fourth of July was a time I looked at the flag of our country. I saw its beauty, its promise--and the daily human price, we on the Central Coast, pay for every star and every stripe. Sphere: Related Content