Our Heritage to Protect

I am fortunate in that I live in northern Ohio. It is not that I like long snowy winters and inconsistent professional sports teams, I do not.

I am fortunate that I live within a couple hours drive from a couple of America’s real treasures.

Just a few hours to the north in Dearborn Michigan is the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.
I have visited there many times. It is one of those places that I can never get enough of. It is an amazing place that documents the American heritage more completely that anywhere I have ever been.

A few hours to the south is the United States Air Force museum. Like the Henry Ford museum The Air Force museum documents America and its people as what they really are.

Americans for the most part are a very motivated, inventive, self sufficient, hard working group of people. They are the subjects of the “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Gets Going” slogan we used to hear a lot.

I consider myself very fortunate in that my father was a master do it yourself-er. He was a child of the depression as well as a WWII Pearl Harbor veteran. He served the entirety of WWII in the Pacific. The early portion of his adulthood was not easy at all.

He was a guy who thought paying someone to do anything you can do yourself was a shame. It may even cost more to do it yourself but in the end you had a good job done, the knowledge and self confidence that you did it yourself. My father learned this through life’s lessons. He did not learn this by taking the easy road. He faced challenges head on and fought them off with hard work and great effort. My father was a true American.

When I was 5 years old I was working on a roof with him, (much to the chagrin of my mother). By the time I was 10 I had used a torch and had welded. These are the lessons of life that are essential to the survival of tough times. There was not a repair job or the building of an item that he did not share with me and we both loved every minute of the experiences.

If I wanted something new that was not a necessity, I had to work for it. One year I raised and sold vegetables in the front yard to get the new fad shirt I wanted for the start of school.

He did not make things easy for us kids. This was not because that was what he wanted, it was because he loved us very much. He knew that for us to survive, we would need to be tough and self sufficient.

Today the times are not so easy, in fact they are down right hard. Foreclosures, job loss and other pains have shaken the American dream. For the first time in many if not most Americans lives, they are faced with the reality of hardship and loss. Prosperity is not right around the corner, we must earn it again.

Now is the time for all Americans to visit places like the museums listed above. Perhaps you too will come to realize that the solution to our hard times does not rest with government or with our lack of hand outs. Our forefathers left us the lessons in these museums of what we need to do to get America working again.

Take the lessons of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and countless others who applied themselves to the problems of the day and overcame them. These were people who created America with their hard work, their hands and their imagination. And they did not need a computer to do it.

America was built with hard work and entrepreneurship. We need to stand up and do it again. Now is the time for Americans to get tough and get going. Let us show a little fortitude in our lifetime so we too can be a great generation, an inspiration for the ones to come. It is time for Americans to get their hands dirty and get to work again. It was done before and now we need to step up, get tough, and do it again. We are the only ones who can.