While flying over Greenland it was clear to me why I felt the way I did about America when I looked at the small Starbucks cup sitting on my tray. We loved to make a name for ourselves. Something that everyone wanted. Only it came tasting more terrible then any coffee you could get around the world and it costed twice the price.
The quality of life at home is grand. But when you got down to the brass tacks you could see that it was made fast and not to last. Empires where built in days. But a legacy was hard to come by anymore.
When I was walking around the gardens of Versailles I saw just how much detail and passion was put in to every stone, picture, and flower. They build a legacy for a reason. To honor what was in the past and make sure that the future understood that an empire could take hundreds of years to make perfect.
We are a young nation. And if I’ve learned anything over the past few years is that when your young you think you know everything. When people that have been around much longer then you say, “this sounds fun now but in a few years you might regret it,” I didn’t want to listen. Just like many parts of the world have told my home to take it slow.
Watching the news in Brussels made me see our country changing. There’s tugging from all corners. Little tares and snags here and there, 9/11, Iraq War, healthcare, The Dream Act, immigration, Tea Party’s, global warming, gangs, poverty, and a high unemployment rate. The thing is little tares and snags slowly wither away the fabric that held us all together in the first place.
I think we need to slow down. Sit down, hell breath. We might have a lot of money to help people all over the world but right on our own soil, people need something to once again make sure that the life they are living can one day be seen as a legacy, not just a number 2 on a quick menu.
I enjoyed going down a street and seeing different kinds of business run by all kinds of people. Seeing and shopping for different things around every comer. Not just a Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart, or Whole Foods. I liked knowing the man who made my crepe and where he got his mushrooms and why he opened his shop. It was more like a home then walking into a Starbucks that are on almost every street corner in Chicago. With the same pictures, hung in the same spots, and a credit card from the corporation to top it.
In a few hundred years maybe we’ll learn. Learn that we have all the time in the world, and if that we personally don’t then the people around us will. I’m not naïve, I know that we need money to make the world go round, but we can at least spend it wisely. Some how we keep running out of it in the U.S. only to all the sudden find more. Like the White House has this giant couch, that they keep finding change under the cushions, every time they turned the channel and people where unhappy with the way things where going.
It’s not left or right, white or black that should guide us, but it ultimately our passion to make a place we can call home.
The more I see the more I think that America is not quit ripe enough for me. We have not been thru our mid-life crises or down on our luck yet. And it’s not up to one person to decide when that is to happen or why.
I learned something….you just gotta let happen……
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