4th of July, in Baghdad

Its the 4th of July, and I am spending it in a tiny little outpost on the outskirts of Baghdad.  Not exactly the prime way to spend the 4th.  No family, friends, no beer, not being by a body of water (other than the little canal of sewage water flowing near our outpost) and not getting to watch any fireworks sort of puts a damper on things.  However we made the best of things. 

I spent the day watching borrowed episodes of Survivorman on my laptop, telling myself that if I was in Les Stroud’s shoes I would do more than just survive I would thrive…lets be serious, the guy is on a beautiful beach in Costa Rica, goes spearfishing gets a fish easily, stops at just one and then complains about how hungry he is.  I would have about 6 fish roasting over the fire, drinking coconut milk and gazing up at the stars to my heart’s content.  I hit the gym and worked on getting a nice muscular physique for my return to civilization in 5 months.  Our gym isn’t air conditioned and hovers around 105 – 110 degrees during the day so I sweat off at least 5 pounds.  We ate a delicious feast of ribeye steaks, BBQ ribs and mashed potatoes.  My platoon even held a dart tournament.

However the minor celebrating that I did do only makes me wonder what our founding fathers would think if they could see what has become of America.  Are they up in heaven cheering our progress, or are they rolling over in their graves bemoaning the monster they created?  I have a feeling that they are probably pretty proud of some aspects of our modern society, like our leading the world in business, that we have overcome issues such as slavery and racism to become a more perfect union and  that we have managed to make representative democracy work for over 200 years now.  However I have a feeling that there are plenty of things associated with our current situation that would make President Washington and President Jefferson cringe.  Our enormous national debt, the fact that social security exists at all, much of our role in foreign policy and all of the pork barrel spending are so far from what is provided for in the constitution that they would probably wonder whether we had completely thrown out the original constitution and started over.  

At any rate I love our nation, America is, in my limited experience the best nation on earth.  However with all the good there is plenty of bad.  As one who is sacrificing years of his life in service of his nation I truly hope that our nation is able to sort out where it is going and what kind of nation we want to be without leaving our national identity in the past.