Different than your average girl

I realized last night at SummerThing, where we took the kids to the yearly carnival that our small town invests in, I'm different than the average girl. I'm not entirely pleased with how I come across to my peers, probably overly-confident and sure of my views, and that gets more obnoxious every year. I can't help it.

I look around at the women who are in the same boat that I am, and imagine their interests extending mostly to fashion, their children, personal dramas, etcetera. I'm not saying I'm perfect, or that I'm too good or above all that. But I can't look at the world around me in the same way that I assume they have. And I admit it's assuming, I'm probably faulty in assuming that.

I look at the men walking beside their wives, I hope it doesn't offend anyone that I'm saying that. And I imagine that some, if not all of these guys, are simultaneously defending our freedoms, or have actually been to war, and seen the worst of the worst sides of man. I wonder if they might be acting happy for the most part, but have actually stood by watching helplessly as some child or infant is terrorized and screaming in some neighboring foreign land.

Perhaps none of them have, maybe it's purely projection, but I sympathize with THEIR cause above and beyond anything an average woman looks at. I feel like freedom is so fragile, and walking through history I recognize its aliveness. It's just a step away that we all depended on stealing and intimidating and destroying each other, just to get the very basics of our needs met.

The educated were the ones who took the helm. The self-proclaimed leaders, because nobody else had faith or courage to decide it, they were the ones that brought civilization into our laps. Much blood was shed, horrific sacrifices were made just to get us where we are today. I'm like ten years beyond still blaming the rest of the world for not getting it, for not understanding that it's entirely up to us to keep our standards for our own selves high enough to accomplish that.

In the blink of an eye we could spiral backwards into the dark ages. Even precious America, only two hundred years old could be lost. Nobody seems to get that in their insistence that we just follow our whims, and take every other principle and standard of behavior for granted. We are who we are because we've held onto the virtues of the past. We stay who we are because we firmly insist that we pay close attention to how we decide to act. It can all be lost in the blink of an eye, it can.