Happy 250th Birthday, America!
I want to write a better post than the one that’s about to spill out of me.
But the truth is, I’m exhausted. It’s 11:27PM on Friday, July 3rd, and I just got home from a really long day of doing Instacart deliveries on a day with a 113°F heat index, and scarfed down a dinner I probably shouldn’t have eaten this late. Does not help with sleep when you’re still digesting.
The day started with Instacart having a generational crashout, the app refusing to work for shoppers for hours. I tried to start work at noon, but couldn’t even click on an order until 2PM.
And I was one of the lucky ones.
Shopper/drivers got stuck with orders they couldn’t finish in the store. The app just stopped working, and they couldn’t complete the transaction.
Others got stuck with groceries in their car, but no destination. The app doesn’t give drivers the address until they’ve completed the checkout process. One lady on X said she was sitting in her car with melting bags of ice and nowhere to go.
Since this is a holiday weekend, it was busy as hell today. An incredibly bad day for the system to go down.
It’s been a weird week, which is why I’ve been so quiet. Between work, one particularly bad day where depression/grief snuck up and got the better of me, and Eli, my youngest, getting his tonsils out, I’ve had no time to sit down and write with a clear head. I’m going over there first thing in the morning to take care of him because his mother has an appointment she can’t miss, so I need to get to sleep soon. It’ll be a nice chance to spend some time with him.
And to top it all off, Sunday should be my 23rd wedding anniversary. That’s hanging heavy over me, I’m not going to lie.
But with all that I’m carrying in my heart going into this weekend, I want to stop and offer a moment of gratitude. There’s a lot about my life that I hate right now, not to put too fine a point on it. But there are things that I love, too, like my kids, and writing about my adventures (even when they’re often otherwise banal), and the customers who appreciate me and go out of their way to show it, and most relevant to this particular post, the fact that I won the lottery when it came to countries you could be born in.
I unironically love being an American. I always have. I’ve travelled outside the US a fair bit, having road tripped thousands of miles through Canada and Mexico, done a mission trip the Bahamas, and visited nearly a dozen countries across Europe. I’ve also been to every single state in the continental 48. (Alaska and Hawaii are still on the list!) And out of all that travelling, I’ve gotten some perspective on the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
America is, as we’ve all experienced in various ways, a country not without its many flaws. It has been fracturing for a long time, and I find that tragic. Nevertheless, there’s not a single place I’d choose to live instead. There’s something beautiful and bold and totally unique about it here. It is a vast nation with some of the most breathtaking landscapes on earth, and an unparalleled abundance of opportunity.
It’s still a land where more dreams come true than anywhere else.
On my mother’s side, I’m descended from a family lineage we can trace back to the Mayflower — the same family that produced such noteworthy figures as Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Orson Welles. On my father’s side, I’m the descendent of Irish and Slovak immigrants who arrived here much more recently. My dad is, himself, a second generation American.
The thing that really drove it all home for me for the first time was when I got the chance to visit the Omaha Beach and the D-Day memorial in Normandy, France. It was 1999. I stood in the bomb craters. I looked at the cliffs that the Army Rangers had to scale. I stepped inside the pill boxes and stood in the shadow of the coastal artillery and imagined the terrors that the Allied Forces faced on that fated day.
It’s a place that’s sacred, in a way I don’t really have the words to explain. It helped me to understand the cost of sacrifice in the service of something higher. A noble ideal.
So many of the white marble crosses simply read, “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms, known but to God.” The individual identities were lost, subsumed into the greater cause. As a 22-year-old man, that really struck me. I had never come face to face with something like that before.
It was powerfully sobering.
But it also made me overwhelmed with pride in my country. And of course, many of my own family members served. This includes my grandfather, Bill Emmons, who was in the US Army Air Corps:
Along with several of his brothers (Paul, Roger, and Lewy), and his sister, my great-aunt Mary, who served in the Coast Guard during the war:
My great uncle Ralph “Lewy” Emmons did not fight on the beaches of Normandy, but he nevertheless came home a decorated hero.
His obituary described his service as follows:
Some will remember him walking with a severe limp due to injuries sustained in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, but not many know that he received the first artificial hip implant. He served in the Army Air Corps with the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment and was a military intelligence staff officer retiring on disability with the rank of Captain. He was awarded the Purple Heart Medal with oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star Medal, and Combat Infantry Badge. Also awarded European-African-Middle Eastern Ribbon with 4 stars for campaigns in So. France, Rome-Arno, Ardennes, and Central Europe, one arrowhead for invasion of So. France, the American Defense Ribbon, American Theater Ribbon, and WWII Victory Ribbon. Lewy showed us that intense suffering can be borne; bravery comes in many forms; nothing is too difficult to learn; and humor is necessary always. He was devoted to God, his family, and his Catholic faith, and was a member of the Nocturnal Adoration Society.
Of course, I didn’t know the war veteran. I knew my grandfather’s older brother, who wore a lifted shoe and walked with a cane and called me “Stephen the Louie” because he thought I looked so much like my dad, Lou Skojec. I still remember his voice — but not his face — but then again, the last time I saw him, I was probably about 3 years old. When my great grandfather died, Lewy became a recluse, and the family lost touch with him until he fell severely ill in his old age, when they finally discovered his whereabouts just a brief time before he died.
All this is to say, I feel a deep connection to this land and its people, and the dream it embodies. When I look around the world, I realize, as someone said today, that there is America and its freedoms, and then there is everywhere else.
In fact the more I look at what’s going on in Britain today, the more certain I am that our Founding Fathers knew exactly what they were doing.
I think this incredible experiment is still a dream worth fighting for.
But for now, it’s well after midnight, and I desperately need some sleep.
Wishing you and yours a happy Independence Day, and America the Beautiful another 250 years!
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