Independence Day

 The following is a column I wrote for the The Herald-News for the July 5, 2012 edition. It was rejected, so I'll just give it to you all for free.

 I spent my evening Saturday working Graysville’s FreedomFest, the community’s Fourth of July celebration. 

The 100-plus degree heat kept most people away throughout the day. I saw a sparse turnout for an auction, and I heard about the even more stale results from the FreedomFest car show and pageant. 

Around 9:15 p.m., though, people started coming. 

Cars filled up the little gravel parking lot at Kristopher’s Kingdom park where the event was held, and the small streets barely wide enough for one vehicle slowly lined up with parked vehicles as the dark came on. 

By 9:35, around 400 people had come out. 

Graysville has long suffered from a reputation that still circulates around the area. The city and its people are usually cast as poor, dirty, simple and frankly, stupid. The image of the city’s park filling up with sweaty adults and dirty-footed, shirtless kids might confirm that stereotype if taken at face value. 

But here’s the thing: a lot of the people are legitimately and legally poor. They have less than others in other areas of the county, the state and the country. They don’t have enough to eat at times. The dirty faces of children and their longful glances at fundraiser concession chili cheese hotdogs and popcorn confirm it. 

The emotional walls and defensive dispositions of their parents do as well. 

A lot of the people are dirty. They have brown-stained jeans, blackened boots and T-shirts with white rings dried around the collar. They’re dirty, though, because they’ve worked all day, either at a job for a company who will likely fire them for being 15 minutes late, even if there was car trouble, or at home, on an old mower or an old car, neither of which can be replaced because the money isn’t there. 

A lot of the people are simple. They won’t talk about super PACs or the electoral college or Nietzsche or Tiffany, Waterford or Chanel.  They’ll talk about growing conditions and can say exactly what date to plant, how much to fertilize, and when to water. 

They can talk about the real job market and how everyone seems to know someone who has lost a job due to outsourcing or businesses that have gone belly up. They can talk about getting by on a fixed income and surviving on a fraction of what some billionaires received in a severance package and then killed themselves over rather than downgrade their standard of living. 

The people aren’t stupid. The city government is poor – budget wise, it falls last of Rhea’s three cities.

During the firework show that the Graysville Volunteer Fire Department put on for the community, at times there were breaks between rockets and explosions and lights. During those breaks, the 400 or so people standing around the little ball field didn’t boo. 

Clapping and cheering went up. They applauded and said thank you. They appreciated it. 

As a reporter, I constantly mentally and emotionally distance myself from the subjects of my reporting and I maintain a fly on the wall mentality. It’s the way it should be. I may have to report on a scandal in the Graysville Volunteer Fire Department tomorrow. 

But at one point, as I looked up at explosions and lights in the black, hot sky, reflective of the bombs and rockets of the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War, it was easy to again be in love with the idea of America and the Americana community ideal, and I ceased to be on the outside looking in, and I became part of the Graysville community. 

For a minute, during the explosions, America was the greatest country on earth, and poverty and jobs and a slipping world economy and power status were out of sight, and I relaxed. 

Just after the display, I was getting in my car, and I ran into a Graysville commissioner and the city’s utility director. 

I overhead the utilities director tell the commissioner that someone had been vandalizing the city’s fire hydrants. The ball park lights came on and illuminated smoke hanging in the air.

Back to reality.