A New World

The historian in me gets twitchy about Columbus Day; I'm not quite sure what it is that we're celebrating exactly, but I am pretty confident that it's historically inaccurate.  However, I'll take any excuse for a federal holiday and, as you know well, I'll take any excuse for a musing.

Sometimes, when I drive out into the countryside, through the rolling hills of Virginia or the darkest forests of Connecticut, I imagine I know how the English felt when they came to North America.  It's hard to picture war or hunger or hardship when gazing upon such a glorious abundance of unsullied land, seemingly removed from anything contemporary even in this day and age.

Both of the first two English settlements in what is now America - Jamestown, founded in 1607, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1620 - were based on the hopes and dreams that nothing but a new world could inspire.  The settlers in Virginia pursued untapped wealth; the pilgrims at Plymouth sought spiritual purity.  Only the virgin earth of America could have provided such fertile ground for the boundless optimism that has come to define this country.

personal photos, Sept-Oct 2012

And the best way, I think, to honor those who came before us - the pilgrims who first set foot on our shores to create a city on a hill, the settlers who struck out west through vast swaths of unknown dangers armed with manifest destiny, the refugees who fled persecution and hopelessness with the burning need to find opportunity -  is to maintain that optimism.  This land has been and can continue to be a new world, a world where anything is possible if we work hard and we work together, not only for our own benefit but also for the common good.

I hope you're having a lovely long weekend, dear readers, and I wish you the best of weeks ahead.