I’ve lived a while and, like a lot of older folks, find myself mulling a lot as I sit here in the shade of the River Tree.
I find myself thinking about five-dollar words like history, culture, spirituality, commitment, and service and what they mean individually and collectively to us.
As I sit here with an iced tea in my hand, I’m thinking about applicable metaphors for this gnarled old oak, growing from an acorn seed with the help of light and organic matter contributed from countless generations of God’s creatures.
The Bible speaks of the tree of knowledge. We also speak of the tree of liberty and the tree of life. I think they’re all pretty apt. We’ve planned, created, sweated and built or failed to do so.
Likewise, we’ve husbanded, cared for, sheltered and loved, or failed to do so, and that has and is making all the difference to the growth which is and must be our life and future.
What’s a good place to start? How about a little history?
Way back, there was just family, and even that was tenuous, every “man” for himself, dog-eat-dog. We gradually learn that working together not only made us safer, but also more productive. But doing so required trust or coercion and threat, and through most of history, it’s been more the latter than the former.
Only since the onset of Christianity have we even begun to wrap our heads around a vision of lovingly, trustingly working with our fellow man. And even that’s been tough. Easy to talk the talk, a lot harder to walk the walk.
But some 250 years ago, trust and a vision of a collaborative, humane, and beautiful future allowed us to plant the seed which has grown into something pretty amazing. Look at the branches: A more and more participatory democracy, more and more universal suffrage, public education for all, a growing number of protections for our rights and freedoms, more wealth than we could have possibly imagined even a couple of generations ago.
There’ve been major bumps in the road, but pretty darned impressive. But what makes it work, what grows this “tree”? Us. We can’t just sit back and hope it’ll continue to grow and thrive. We’ve got to work our tails off. For our own benefit, our family’s benefit, and our community’s benefit. For a better, safer, freer life and world. In the coming days and months, we’re going to explore here and elsewhere, ways that we can use the “shade” and collaboration of “The River Tree” to work together to encourage folks to embrace those five-dollar words: spirituality, commitment and service, as well as others such as ethics and civic engagement.
How? We’re working with a lot of folks across the political spectrum, from representatives Bryant Wolfin, John Martin and Dave Griffith, state senators Steve Roberts and Jamie Burger, former legislator and Missouri director of revenue Wayne Wallingford, retired member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Frank Grass, head of the Missouri, Eastern Kansas and Western Illinois Army Recruitment Command, Lt. Col. C.J. Jones, DESE legislative liaison Perry Gorrell, public school administrators, cultural institution heads and others to first secure passage of legislation to create state “Seals of Civic Recognition” for motivated, committed, service-oriented high school seniors and then create and burnish the support structure to ensure its success.
We need everyone to be part of the effort, if it has any hope of success. We’re going to be getting together Tuesday, June 24, for a 12:30 pm. luncheon meeting in the Walnut Room at the Perryville American Legion. We’re all invited to participate, and if we feel the urge, become part of the River Tree Partnership.
