Today is Canada Day, National Postal Worker Day, and my Dad’s birthday which forms a triad of coincidence. My dad (and mom) was a postal worker for over thirty years, and his dad, my grandfather was born in Canada and growing up we had many relatives living there, so this day has always been a highlight in my year. This year, in addition to the semiquincentennial of our nation’s founding, we are also celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the postal service.
It was established during our country’s fight for independence and it is officially and nationally created in the Constitution. Benjamin Franklin was its first postmaster general. I waited in line at his post office in Philadelphia for a commemorative stamp cancellation. I’ve always had a strong connection to the post office, from hanging out in the back offices, sorting mail (unofficially, of course), testing the stampers, and collecting my own sets of stamps as my parents did. I still collect some stamps if they are of interest, and our kids have several sheet sets framed in their room.
Below, you will see some of the stamps that I have that commemorate and/or celebrate this country from the Founding to the Underground Railroad to Free Speech, and the many people who contributed to our potential.
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I am a sucker for a good food tie-in, and product branding. Especially when it’s mostly my favorite snacks. I know they want my money, but I want their product, so it’s win-win for everyone.
I don’t know if you’ll see these on shelves this week; I got two of them over a month ago (Oreos and my favorite Tootsie Rolls!). If it has red, white, and blue sprinkles on it, I’ll take one and I may even share!
I’ve struggled since Memorial Day thinking, debating with and challenging myself on whether or not I want to celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the founding of this country. I was raised to be proud of the United States. My parents raised me to be respectful of the flag, to stand for the pledge and the National Anthem, my duty to vote and to sit on a jury, and to believe that this is the greatest country. It has that potential certainly. It could be. We are in a place where anything’s possible. If I moved to Japan, I couldn’t become Japanese, but anyone can move here and become an American. That used to be a good thing.
Let’s be honest: as much as I’m in denial, I won’t be here in fifty years to celebrate the tricentennial and it saddens me that so much of this celebration has been taken away from us. I look at the waving flags and I feel nothing but ill. Sadness of what we’ve been reduced to.
But I’m not going to let a group of corrupt racists take this week away from me. I’m not. I left my flags up for Memorial Day (as they should be flown for our fallen), and then took them down a week later. I’ve decided to put them up again for the next two weeks. I think it’s important to celebrate our past, to acknowledge and reconcile the bad, to praise the good, and to hope for the better, and for a better future filled with joy and equality, laughter and hope, so that’s what I am going to do.
Everyday this week, I’ll have something else to share, from heartfelt to commercial, consumer bandwagons, and of course, baseball…
and apple pie.
Stuck between the idea and an ideal, somehow despite the advantages and privilege still remains elusive. I’m talking about our country, the United States, the great democratic experiment. It has never been perfect, and it has been idealized by the patriarchal class. It began, and remains today in many places and situations, with white men, landowners with money, wifely support, servants and slaves. That slavery was written into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, an irony and a tragedy if ever there was one. In thirty-four days is a celebration that I would normally be looking forward to, but the state of our government and the administration currently in charge is making it increasingly more difficult to get behind a “celebration” or an honoring of what we have been and what we are becoming.
How is this related to mental health?
Mental health awareness month officially ended yesterday, but our mental health awareness must continue – the awareness of how we’re feeling, how people make us feel, what triggers us, and how to cope with those triggers. At our house, we have four flags in the front along with a pride flag. I left the US flags displayed in honor of our fallen for Memorial Day. I’ve decided to remove them for June. I think Flag Day has been coopted by the current president as his birthday party, and I will not participate in that. At all. I plan to replace the flags for July 4th weekend and then remove them again until Election Day.
I feel for the people who say we have nothing to celebrate. Sometimes I believe that, but sometimes I see what good happens when people do good; without the cameras rolling, without the benefits of being seen, without heaped upon praise, simply acting because that is the right thing to do. That is what I believe this country can be. I was raised that way, and I hope I’ve raised my kids that way. The ideal of the idea of the US is the melting pot, the blending of many into one – e pluribus unum.
I’ll ignore the circus in Washington, D.C. for the next few weeks, although I won’t ignore the harm they’re doing, the persecuted, the shamed, the bigotry and racism abounding currently, and acknowledging this is nothing new, we’ve always had this. We’ve hoped for the best, and I hope and pray that we can rebuild, not rebuild what we had, but a stronger foundation, a stronger, more equal place for the world to come and to look to as my great-grandparents did, as my mother-in-law did. I want us to be what we can be, what we should have been all along.
I have memories of the Bicentennial, and I am going to make memories for the 250th. I want my kids to look back in another fifty years for the three hundredth birthday and see how far we’ve come. I can hope. I can encourage.
Regardless, take your mental health temperature, and see what you want out of the next few weeks, how you want to celebrate or ignore our country’s founding, how you can stay on your recovery course in the best possible way. Make your coping tools available so when triggered you have the mental space to reset. First and foremost, take care of you.
And for my own mental health, I can ignore Washington’s circus monkeys through this birthday and then get back on the protest wagon and fight for our democracy, repair what they’ve destroyed (including the Rose Garden and the East Wing and the Voting Rights Act and Roe v. Wade), and rekindle a better place for all of us. I have faith. We can do it. We can.
Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride warning of the British Army approaching. He was forty years old. The Sons of Liberty put lights in Boston’s Old North Church: one if by land, two if by sea.
Yesterday, projected on the front of the Old North Church was the following warning:
One if by land, Two if by D.C.
There were two lights.
When I first wrote this post, I asked who will warn us this time?
We have that answer.
However, who have we ignored the warnings of?
There are two lights in the church window.
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 