Oh what a beautiful morning and oh what a beautiful day! If every day of Summer were as today, I would consider it a worthwhile cause enduring some of those naughty winter days to be able to enjoy days as today. It feels as though May and June just simply passed us by due to the exceptionally late Spring and abundant rain. I’m now ready to enjoy each and every day of July. With RAGBRAI coming to Mason City, it’s going to be even more memorable. By the way, I want to thank and continue to encourage everyone who’s starting to do extra landscape maintenance in and around the central city area. I want to see an army of able bodied citizens getting together and going from yard to yard getting rid of volunteer trees and overgrown weeds growing along foundations and fences. I actually did just that for a friend of mine this morning. He is not physically capable of cutting out volunteer trees around his house, so I spent about a half hour going around and cutting them out and stacking them for the yard waste truck. His home looked much better as I drove away.
I stopped for a moment in Central Park and took the photo posted in this article of one of the monuments in the Veterans Memorial. I thought that it was appropriate due to the times in which we now live. A renewed war in the Middle East with what appears to be an unraveling of all the work that our country has performed in the spirit of keeping peace. The violence in Ukraine, the Far East, and the bloody genocide in some of the African nations are all causing the deaths of innocent people who simply want to go about living their lives in peace. The core reasons seem to be as they have been for hundreds of years—super-nationalism, religion, and as always, the thirst for power. The brutality of it all is what frightens me. It is as though we are seeing a return of mindsets to that of the Dark Ages. Darkness seems to be attracting the darkness of mind, body and spirit. I continue to believe there is hope for us all as long as we press against those things that we know deep in the core of our beings to be wrong. The last line of the prayer in the photo says, “Let Peace Reign Throughout The World.” Let us all work towards that goal of truly causing peace to reign in the world. That is my wish on this eve of Independence Day.
