Sunday, September 11, 2011

In an Age of Fops and Toys

Consider for a moment, quietly, silently, those young, and sometimes older, men and women who for the past 10 years have volunteered, each for their own reason, to join, fight and sometime die, or come home less than whole in either their bodies or minds, for the Idea of The United States of America, Freedom and Liberty from fear or danger.

Home to a country who's people support and honor them, but, who's politicians (a more derogatory term I cannot think of) spend them uselessly in foreign lands, spending the wealth of their blood and minds, as well as the wealth we could use at home, for personal and political gain.

When will we awaken, and like the giants who founded this Republic, throw off the shackles they use to keep us quiescent?


In an Age of Fops and Toys
By: Ralph Waldo Emerson

In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right,
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom’s fight,—
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay
And quit proud homes and youthful dames
For famine, toil and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

2 comments:

Borepatch said...

Great post, simply superb.

Even if you did quote a yankee poet. ;-)

kdzu said...

Thanks, I suspect ol' Ralph would have considered himself more of a Sovereign Individual than either Yankee or Southerner now-a-days.