Americans are all the same
Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under Michael Paskel |
I’ve just returned from a two-week business trip, which took me throughout the Midwest and Deep South. While a lot of the geography I saw differed greatly from the sprawling Tennessee Valley, which has always been my home, I’ve been refreshed in the knowledge that geography is about the only thing that differentiates the people of this country. Throughout the states, and I’ve seen most all of the lower forty-eight, I still believe that we are, each of us, the same.
Those I met are the same as all the others you or I meet everyday in our communities; our co-workers and our family members; no differences at all. They struggle, they plan and they hope for the best. But all too often they deal with some of the most difficult of circumstances one could imagine
I heard from folks about their lives and their thoughts about our country and our shared experiences, our common destiny. I learned that waitresses in a truck stop in Marion, OH., are the same as a store manager in Winston Salem. Each expressed concern about their jobs and their kids. They worry about illegal drugs, health care for their families and about being able to advance in their careers and pay mortgages and takes vacations. I spoke to a housekeeper in Jonesboro N.C., who works to pay for feeding her own children as well as her sisters kids back in Guatemala. She has worked two jobs, 7 days a week for the last three years and is happy to be able to do so. Her kids go to public school but she doesn’t take any public assistance. Not exactly the picture I’ve had in mind of illegal immigrants.
I met another hotel worker in Palm Beach Fl. who also works two jobs to put her daughter through college and to make payments on the small house she bought. A police officer in Tallahassee told me about his son who had joined the army in order to get educational opportunities that he could not afford to provide. Instead of a college classroom, his son wound up walking a post on the midnight shift in a hellhole alley in down town Baghdad. The cop started working nights after that.” If Kip can carry a rifle through that hell at night, so can I” he told me.
In Lexington, I talked to a man who said he was afraid that he would not be able to support himself and his wife after retirement on social security and would have to work part time just to put food on the table. She was in a wheelchair and he had type II diabetes. I met a delightful child and his trucker father at a Taco Bell in Cincinnati. The little fellow said he wanted to meet the president one day. His toothless father smiled with pride at this aspiring young cosmopolitan. I’ll bet he does.
In Charleston S.C, I talked to a woman whose daughter is in the hospital critically ill; she and her husband take turns pulling 12-hour shifts at the ICU afraid that the next minute might be the child’s last. The hospital bills are pilling up and they fear losing their modest home. They have two other children who are staying with relatives while this desperate battle is being waged. “ Thank God for Ronald McDonald house,” they said.
While each of these people have to one degree or another, difficulties that most of us don’t, their experiences are not outside of the common collective American experience. Too often the stories of these people and the problems they encounter never rise above the daily cacophony of our own existence. We seem not to dwell on things over which we can’t exert our influence, nor which we cannot see in our immediate field of view. This is human nature…. all too human nature!
Just the same, if we take the time to look carefully, around each of us there are stories of great courage and extraordinary heroism; stories of abject poverty and pain of unimaginable scope. We can see in each of them, on a fundamental scale, what struggling against seemingly overwhelming odds, is truly all about.
Perhaps heroism doesn’t flow only from seismic occurrences in great military or political struggles, not from disasters of man’s hand or of God’s, but from the everyday anonymity of people who overcome tragedy armed only with the simple tools of love, commitment, and dedication to their families, their communities and their country.
Americans are all the same. Just different.
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Wow Michael, those pictures are amazing. Awesome read. I completely agree.