no exceptions

Where to begin? Pleasure boats large and small heading out across StAndrewsBay. A snowy egret sailing by at surface level seven stories below, wings wide, legs and feet stretching behind. Earlier an osprey, and there go pelicans coasting as a pair. What can I say. It’s a beautiful day. Fourth of July USA in +Time+ and every day is a beautiful day.

From my Bay window Sunday evening I watched fireworks at BayPoint across the way. There’ll be more tonight, City of PC fireworks shot from a barge in the Bay off Harrison Avenue. Someone will be playing the Star Spangled Banner. Flag, we’ll see the flag. What am I remembering about the flag? Discussing our flags with Ai-san, my secretary in Japan, my astonishment that she thought her flag, the Rising Sun, more beautiful than my Star Spangled Banner: at age twenty-eight I experienced that patriotism and national exceptionalism are subjective. Hiroshima and Nagasaki not yet even twenty years behind us, Ai-san thought, and I thought I knew. There are no facts, but points of view. This is mine:

What might national exceptionalism be? A mixing bowl nation where every child without exception goes to bed with a full stomach and as healthy as the best medical care can provide.

Absent that, a society and nation is not worth the powder to blow it to hell.

North Korea testing ICBMs with USA in mind, AYFSM? Over the long weekend I’ve watched films online. One a travelogue of lovely Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, a school for boys starring one little boy who’s learning Quran by heart in Arabic, its tongue. He doesn’t know Arabic, that’s next to understand what he’s saying, but what he does know is that anyone outside Islam will burn in hell. But WTH, I know “Christians” who know that.

What’s at the end of this blogpost’s winding road. That an exceptional nation would have room for all without exception, sans hatreds. I don’t know of one. No godly image, we’re all human.

God bless America anyway.

DThos+