...And That's My Opinion©

By Sandy Goldman

The Rogers Park Community Curmudgeon

When I was in 8^th grade at Le Moyne Grammar School, our teacher Mrs. Holtz gave us an assignment. It was to pick a subject of great significance and then to enumerate the reasons why and its ramifications in both the present and the future in what she called “a pyramid of thoughts”.

With apologies to Mrs. Holtz (whom I loved dearly) - here is a “pyramid of thoughts” more than 55 years later - significant to both the present and the future.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN - BEING AN AMERICAN?

• The right to disagree with your neighbor.

• The desire to have cocktails with the same neighbor.

• Praying together while in different houses of worship.

• Unrestricted borders and the freedom to travel through them.

• To satisfy the desire to travel in foreign countries and be a tourist.

• A solid economy—in the final analysis!

• Political leaders who ARE world leaders despite their shortcomings.

• Neighborhoods where people live together - not always in harmony but neither in armed conflict.

• E Pluribus Unum--out of many, one.

• Placing a man on the moon.

• To mourn, to cry and to get up and start again.

• The people of the great westward trail of our early history and the great country they produced.

• The victories in many wars for many freedoms and the courage to know when we were wrong.

• The dark shadows of our country - slavery, the Japanese and German concentration camps in this country in WW II, the Capone gangster era, the McCarthy era, the Pullman strikes of 1894, and the quota system in employment, housing, and education and other evils - but to know also that there are concomitant goods.

• A day of national prayer.

• Hundreds of thousands of workers manually sifting the ruins at WTC, at Oklahoma City, at the earthquake at San Francisco and at dozens of other catastrophes.

• To go to bed at night unfettered and unhindered and to awake the same way the next day.

• The freedom of speech.

• The freedom of the press.

• The freedom to love and yes - alas, the freedom to hate.

• The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

• The courage to admit our faults and the resolve to correct them.

• The chance to grow old and be relatively healthy or to have places in which to be cared for.

• To fall in love and to marry one’s own choice.

• The right to have children or not and to have grandchildren all of whom will live in a free society.

• The right to criticize and to be criticized.

• The right to join a union or not.

• The ability to grow as far as the ability to go.

• To know that in times of jeopardy the country unites – The United States of America.

• The best medical care in the world.

• Seeing Grand Coulee Dam, Hoover Dam, Yellowstone Park, the Teton mountain range, Mt. Rushmore, and Chief Crazy Horse monument.

• The Statue of Liberty.

• The skill to be erudite and incisive and intelligent and also to be stupid and boorish and a jerk. Even to be anti-American. The last two always seem to go together.

• The potential to be a successful entrepreneur and also a possible failure.

• To have the strength, the resolve and the financial resources to seek and find and punish those who would attempt to destroy us.

• The right to fly the flag (but secure it tightly, someone pilfered ours on Sept. 14th).

• God Bless America (even the scoundrel who stole our flag).

...And that's my opinion.

And I'm Sandy Goldman

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