Our Country's Youth

You know, I've been watching snippets of the "John Adams" HBO special. Besides the fact that it was exquisitely written and acted, it reinforced the tenuousness of life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Here today, gone tomorrow, literally. And if something was wrong with you, you simply worked through it until it or something else finally took you. There were no feats of modern medicine to save you, no x-rays, MRI's or CAT scans to let you know what was going on inside. There were no drugs, or very few, to cure you or even to relieve symptoms. Our ancestors were hearty souls to survive long enough even to procreate, let alone to live to any significant age.

If their rotten teeth didn't get them, their appendix did. If the hazards of their livelihoods didn't get them, the critters in their environments did. If they didn't die in childbirth, they died as infants. If they did go so far as to have surgery performed, they frequently died of infection. I fear we frequently forget how far we have come and how fortunate we are to be able to rise above all this.

I also think it was a very special coincidence that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day, July 4th, 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the birth of our nation. There has to have been some karma going on there. The last thing John Adams said on his deathbed was, "Jefferson survives". Of course, he actually outlived Jefferson by a short amount of time only. They were soul mates, even though they had their differences at one point, they were closer to each other than any of our key historic figures of that time.

I love history. I can't wait until September when I'm going back to Washington, D. C. to a conference after which Mike will join me and we'll tour the sights for 3 days. He's never been there and I've wanted nothing more than to go back since I was there 16 years ago.

You won't find anywhere that makes you prouder to be an American. The museums there are the one thing you definitely don't mind paying taxes to support. Definitely something to look forward to.