My Song
Posted: Thursday, July 16, 2009
by Steven Rogers
Last night I was sitting alone in the dark after I put my girls to sleep enjoying a brief moment of me time' before bed. I had turned off the lights and turned on my mp3 player to drown out every thing for about five minutes, as I do on occasion, when a Lee Greenwood song came on. As anyone close to me knows, I am not much of a fan of country music but one song of his holds a very special place in my heart. It is called God Bless the USA. This song is significant to me personally because it is the song they played at the end of my training at Paris Island. Every single time I hear this song I go back to that moment standing there before the Iwo Jima monument. I can smell the ocean. I can feel the wind. I can hear the drill instructor say, "Congratulations marine." I get just as emotional today as that day; my chest still pokes out just a little extra with pride as that song plays. It is a wonderful feeling and I sincerely hope every one of you has a trigger like that, something that instantly wisp you from your every day life to a place where everything was perfect even if just for a moment. I digress from my point though. I have heard this song as you can imagine probably hundreds of times. I know the words every one by heart. I know the rhythms and as a musician even the chord changes, but something in me heard something last night. The first line from the song caught me up last night and I was overcome. I listened to it over and over end even after I turned it off as I was lying in bed it was still with me. It says,
I'd worked for all my life
And I had to start again
With just my children and my wife
I'd thank my lucky stars
To be living here today
Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can't take that away"
I started to imagine if we lost everything, our house, our car, our clothes, our jobs, our insurance, our phones, everything. What would we do? It is hard to imagine being penniless or homeless. Try. It is a terrible thought. Most of us don't worry about this happening but I can tell you from experience it can and does happen. It happened to me about ten years ago. I was in a horrible car accident. I won't go into all the details but to say that my knee was obliterated to the point that I was rushed in for emergency surgery. They could not repair the knee cap so they said that I would just have to live without one and due to the muscle and tendon damage I could very we'll expect to live the rest of my life with a cane. I had a good job and life was pretty good for me. I lost everything. No car, no home, and no real means to support myself. My job didn't offer insurance and at just over 20 years old I didn't have the foresight to get my own. My daughter, just a baby at the time, was in the vehicle with me that day. You can never no the pain I felt hearing her scream from her car seat not knowing if she was hurt or not and not being able to get to her. She was fine thank God! For a brief moment I was faced with not having her nothing is worse than that. Now ten years later, I relived that few minutes with the first of this song and it was every bit as horrible as then but the song goes on. I would thank my stars just to be an American if faced with that again, because slowly over the last ten years I have rebuilt. I went back to school and finished my degree. Now I have another good job. I have a beautiful wife and another great little girl. My life is full and I feel like one of the richest men on earth. It was my choices and desire that rebuilt my life. The freedoms we as Americans enjoy are what made that possible. Some of the government programs have really good intentions but to force people to fund or participate is wrong. People can do anything they want to do in this country. That is what makes it so great! If you choose to work hard and to be a success you will, if you choose to be a lazy good for nothing you will succeed in that as well. What people don't understand is that no matter what you give to a person it's what they do with it that makes a difference. The government has no right to reward the lazy or the stupid with the wealth of the smart and successful. It is so frustrating to see a person demand from the government what they didn't earn when I, and many of the people I know, work so hard for everything that comes our way. Tell the government to get out of the way. Let us succeed or fail as we decide.
Steven is a self proclaimed right wing Christian extremist. He is a former Marine and currently work in the laboratory of a cancer research and treatment facility. He is the father of three and is referred to as genius by his wife (mostly as a sarcastic term of endearment!)
This Article has been viewed 245 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.