We attended the Independence Day parade in Wheaton for the second year.  Its an old fashioned “people’s parade” with many volunteer organizations, businesses, civic groups, churches, and of course government officials making up the procession.  The event lasts for at least an hour.  Main street Wheaton is a long, broad, straight road stretching for miles through a neighborhood of well appointed homes.  Families gather with friends on driveways and lawns to enter into the festivities.  Ours was not the only family to set up early in order to prepare a breakfast of pancakes on the gas griddle, eggs, bacon, sausage.  Children played until

10AM when the sound of wailing sirens in the distance announced the approach of the fire engines.  I’ve included a few pictures illustrating the variety of visual and aural experience offered to all present.

I admit that I was looking forward to seeing Peter Roskam who represents this 6th District in Congress.  Roskam is a Republican, a member of the party that “rode into power” on the coattails of the president we now have.  I planned on calling out, not to say “hello” but to give him a unmistakable “thumbs down.”  Roskam and his party have attempted to dramatically reduce Medicaid the only means by which poor and disabled can receive medical

treatment and in many cases, life sustaining support.  I wanted to register my nay vote to this murderous, cruel aspiration of Roskam and his Party.  Mr. Roskam did not march in the Parade.  I am by no

means the only one who would have give him a “thumbs down” and some would likely have given him worse.

We have persistent problems within our society, our customary way of organizing ourselves.  A wise, just and persuasive government is the only life-line that we have.  May God favor us to avoid the horror of sacrificing one another, and help us to do the right but difficult work to build a sustainable earth and country.

A few words from Wendell Berry to conclude this post.

We have this small contrivance
we call “the economy,”
utterly detached
from our households
and our need for food,
clothing, and shelter,
in which people
“put their money to work for them”
and sit down to wait the increase,
which money interbreeding with money
enlarges itself to monstrosity,
glutting on the world’s goods.

This economy,
centralized and concentrated
in the larger cities,
imposes its great equation
of ignorance and power.

–Wendell Berry, A Small Porch
2016 Counterpoint Press