Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness is alive and well in central Minnesota. In our small town people are gearing up for the annual town festival—Rockford River Days. I myself will not only be enjoying many of the activities, but will also be working some of the booths. One is for the Rocket Booster Club, which is in the infant stage of development right now. A group of us is trying to get this started to help support our kids and promote extra-curricular activities. The other booth is for our Boy Scout troop, which is going to be selling corn to raise money for their activities. There will be other groups as well that have booths---the Girl Scouts, local churches, the Historic Stork House, the local history club. I know I’m missing some, but the gist is that all of the people there are into promoting, encouraging, building, and celebrating our town, our history, our neighbors, our kids, etc, etc.

These types of small town celebrations go on all over the state, and I’m sure in other states as well. Each town usually has its own theme, or something that it celebrates. It could be sauerkraut, raspberries, kolackys; or maybe its lumberjacks, arts and crafts, or the Vikings (not the football team). Our parade is on Sunday, and a good number of other local communities will send over their floats to promote their own town festivals. I love this kind of stuff.

Segue for a moment. One of our neighboring towns, Delano, puts on the largest parade in Minnesota on the 4th of July, which we attend every year. There are hundreds of units, and it takes a couple of hours. Last year we were in Corpus Christi TX on the 4th of July. Their parade route was right across the street of our hotel. We were really excited about seeing a big city parade. As we walked over, we noticed that people were crossing the big 4-lane boulevard and setting up on the frontage road that ran along the marina. Hmmm, that didn’t seem right. This road was about as wide as a bike path. Let me see if I can remember some of the highlights from this parade---there was the Rodriguez family from Victoria TX in their own car waving at everyone; there were about 5 golf carts carrying city officials who waved at everybody; there was a cub scout pack, with about 5 scouts marching; that’s all I remember. What a major disappointment it turned out to be. Who said they do things bigger in TX?

The point of this---the world today is full of mayhem, strife, dying, hatred, disasters, and calamity (let me break out the thesaurus to continue the description); but, thank God we live in the good old U.S. of A. Liberals can get into their self-flagellation and angst over all that is going on in the rest of world, I’m not. The rest of the world, apart from those countries following the Judeo-Christian worldview, is a cesspool and they have no one to blame but themselves—for following their own worldviews that bring on all the crap that they put up with. I’m not going to feel guilty chowing down on ears of corn, to support scouting, just because some Hindu in India is starving because he won’t eat the cow out his front door because it could be his great-great grandfather. Again, the Constitution of the United States of America gives me the opportunity to pursue happiness, and I’m going to take advantage of it.