Are you ready to celebrate another birthday? The older I get the faster the years go by. Here it is again another birthday for the most unique country in the world, the United States of America.

Seldom does a day go by when I don’t thank the Lord for being born in this country. I have talked with people from all over the world and one thing they all have in common, life in America is better than any other country.

What started off as an experiment in democracy 231 years ago continues to evolve. When you read the back stories of the founding fathers it is evident they hoped it would continue to evolve and wrote the constitution to deal with it.

Generations before me and for generations after me they will question whether those same founding fathers ever dreamed of the changes we have seen and of the changes that will come in the future.

If is often said that the crafters of our Constitution would have never dreamt of the ways we communicate, the way we travel or the destruction of modern day guns.

During their time it could take days, weeks or months to send or receive the news to other states or countries. It is hard to imagine that they have foreseen a time when it would take just seconds?

During the 1700’s it could take hours to travel from town to town, days to travel from state to state, months to cross the ocean. Today it only takes hours to travel across the ocean and we can travel to the moon in days.

During their time guns took minutes to make them ready to fire and shoot a bullet. Today guns fire hundreds of rounds in the same length of time.

They may not have been able to foresee the changes that would come to this new country, but they knew there would be changes. Thomas Jefferson recognized the need the country would have to continually adapt to changes. His attributable comment that we may need revolution every ten years to keep the constitution a living document, was undoubtedly made with this in mind.

One thing I know for sure, our forefathers learned from past history and built on the best of the past and added their own touches to, as they said, “insure our domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

If I was receiving an academy award I would have to say, “I want to thank Antoine Emery for having the foresight to venture to Canada in 1665. I would also like to thank Hector Emery for moving to Michigan in the early 1900’s from Canada. Because of their foresight I was born in this country.

As each Independence Day celebration comes and goes I am grateful that this is my country. I may complain about some things I don’t agree with or don’t like, but I am still walking around, not in jail for making my feelings known. There are many countries in this world that would have put me in jail because they either don’t have freedom of speech or only pay lip service and say they do.

When we are talking about what our founders may not have been able to visualize, let’s not forget how successful our nation has become. This nation has come a long way from its rustic beginnings and hopes of just being able to control their own destiny to where we are today, the world’s only superpower.

We are considered a superpower because of the freedoms we have and our willingness to protect them. But surprisingly it is not our ability and willingness to fight that has made us the envy of the world. It goes much further than that.

It is the byproduct of freedom that makes it all possible. When you have freedom you have mental as well as physical freedom to take your life in any direction you desire. It is because of this that doors are opened for inventions and innovations that keep us moving forward. Through our personal success we have helped create successes for the world.

We have become a nation that now leads the world in providing jobs and improving the economies of countries throughout the world. There are people throughout the world who have been able to improve their standard of living thanks to us.

Every American should take a minute and just think about how they as an individual and all of us as a country make the world a much better place and do it while preserving a way of life that most people throughout the world just dream of.

In the future necessary changes will be made, we will have problems, we may do the wrong thing for the right reason, but through it all we know that our founding fathers had the foresight to put a mechanism in place to preserve our freedoms while we work through the problems.

We are celebrating another birthday. We will have parades both on the water and off. We will have backyard barbecues and pre-fire works celebrations. Then at the end of the celebration, we will gather at Eaton Ferry Bridge and we will have one of the best fireworks displays in the area.

What a way to celebrate our birthday.

Happy birthday everyone.

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