Louis Roney: America the beautiful

Whatever concept of God you have, if you have been around the world a bit, you’ll recognize that America is a blessed piece of real estate.

If that fact had not been true, I think the Pilgrims would have turned their ships around and sailed home.

Once our forebears had started governing themselves in Virginia, Massachusetts, etc., people in the countries they had left began to compare their lives with ours, and theirs were often found wanting.

France’s revolution was some 14 years after ours, and England began to modify its monarchy in such ways that the crown remains today only a symbol.

America, our “sweet land of liberty” has inexorably changed, as does a beautiful young girl who grows into a handsome, intelligent woman.

We have shared the burdens of a weary old world, in the ways that a solicitous son might look after his care-ridden father.

World War I — “the war to end all wars” — produced wholesale battlefield slaughter seldom experienced in all human history; and for what?

Learning little or nothing from WWI, the warring nations created the political climate that generated another world war that used advanced weapons capable of killing whole populations at a stroke.

Various and sundry smaller wars have come, gone and remain, and have left their funeral memories in thousands of American homes.

A simple Florida country boy like me must be forgiven if he can’t keep score in this baffling worldwide game of war(s).

Throughout, America remains emblazoned bright in my thoughts and devotion.

We hear much of “mistakes” made by the U.S.; who expects perfection?

My own mistakes can often be remedied by me. However, macrocosmic international mistakes are unamendable save by the unlikely united goodwill of world powers — and how we need them today!

In the summer of 1939, after my freshman year in college, I got a job driving a kitchen bus on a coast-to-coast educational tour. For the first time I saw, unfolding before my eyes, the great map of the U.S. in its staggering totality.

How well I remember driving across the hot flat plains of Kansas that extended into the first half of Colorado. Then, one day I saw a great mountain that dwarfed everything else in sight. That night, I slept on the ground at the foot of 14,110-foot Pike’s Peak, and wondered what the thoughts were of the first pioneers when they encountered the Rocky Mountains!

The next day I walked to the top of Pike’s Peak and looked back upon the prairie land I had driven across the previous two days.

I have been up Pike’s Peak several times in recent years, and each visit brings back to me the majesty of our country when seen from nearly 3 miles above the earth.

“All of this is mine,” I thought — and it’s yours as well.

During many years of singing in Europe, I never forgot that I was, in fact, an “ambassador” from the United States, and that my actions would bring either honor or shame to my great homeland. That thought guided me wherever I was.

Let us hope that future Americans will conduct themselves as proud advertisements of the USA for, you see, there is no other place like America on the face of this Earth.

“May the sun in his course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own country! ” – Daniel Webster

Happy July 4th!