By Erica Rohde
Staff Writer
There was a day when I was a little girl, and I was standing in the hot Texas sun as I watched strange uniformed men place the stars and stripes over my grandfather’s casket.
Though I was young, I somehow understood what respect looked like in these men’s eyes. I listened to the people’s silence, hearing its value with the trumpets playing Taps that stirred my heart. That was nobility and patriotism, the definitions of which are only fully understood when accompanied by some larger-than-ourselves feeling that we cannot exactly find the origin of. I was moved with the colors, the quietness among the dry grass, and that a man like my grandfather honored America, or freedom, thus America honored him.
Today I am 17, longing for honor. But it is strange how easily I forgot about this desire. Life pushes you different directions. Sometimes you may forget about where you come from, who died for you, the meaning of the never letting the flag hit the ground and if you are really deserving of that freedom bestowed on you since birth. I think whatever you believe in – God or fate – that I received my chance to interview a former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane my sophomore year through The Sidekick newspaper.
I would have never been so moved to question my disposition and faith in my own country. I had been discouraged a long the way to high school, told that I was stupid, thinking I was insignificant for awhile among my fellow classmates. But McFarlane’s words made it evident that this was not the case. I had long believed in a God who makes me believe that my individual person is worth fighting for, but what McFarlane echoed was that my own country was taking bullets for me. It was never too late to begin my personal journey for America within myself. All I needed was time to find this piece of me.
I received my invitation in the mail for the LeadAmerica’s 2013 Presidential Inaugural Leadership Summit this past November. I still do not know how I received it, whether it was a board monitoring my high school career or if I was nominated. Nonetheless, I received a mutual yes from my parents that night, the night I did not sleep at all.
I left for Washington D.C. on Jan. 18 and navigated the airport on my own for the first time. LeadAmerica representatives found all of the teens, checked us off and shuttled us to the Hilton where I knew no one. The first group of teens I met was from Dubai as we sat down for orientation. As we began our conversations I could not help but laugh at myself because I had been so ignorant to think that people from different parts of the world and even different parts of the United States were extremely unalike. I found the human spirit, or the teenage spirit, to be the same no matter where you come from. For this my heart began to smile every step of the way.
That first day, I attended the Global Issue Seminar centered on the experiences of former congressmen Jim Jones and Bill Frenzel. Their Democratic and Republican bipartisanship is accompanied by a friendship that was established many years before. Jones explained with passion that Congressmen with different views in the 1970s went to work and went home to know each other on a human basis. When they clashed in Congress, they still took nights out to have dinner with each other’s families.
My “Business Start-ups in the Developing World” seminar examined the interdependence of the third world nations on a global scale. Marshall Bailly, the Founder and Executive Director of the Leadership Initiatives organization which aids citizens in starting up businesses within their community, had us Skype with leaders in growing businesses in Nigeria. A young boy had started his own carpenter business for his community. He answered our questions to the best of his translator’s abilities.
Meeting General Colin Powell, however, was not a seminar. Everyone gathered in the Plaza Ballroom. He walked up onto the podium and many of us were star struck, though some students had not until that point heard his name before. His words were clusters of motivation and technical politics. He said, and many of us agreed, that democracy will always consist of shouting and screaming, but whether we choose to call each other brothers at the end of the day is a matter of our true motivations for the betterment of our country.
Powell explained that he was not the best student in college, that his teachers would be rolling over in their graves had they heard that there was a school currently named after him. Bottom line is that if you did not live up to your expectations your high school year, this in no way means that it determines your future.
We are living in a country allowing us to do what our heart sets out to do – to work hard and to fight past every stress-filled tear, to pick ourselves up when we fall and to keep going satisfies the coveted feeling of living life to its greatest potential. That is one value I discovered. Patriotism, when executed with love and regard to others, is a great pathway that eliminates the feeling of hopelessness and loneliness. To be united, to learn to love differentiating citizens, and to recognize that America will change with the times is a fulfilling feeling.
About once or twice a day, I would meet up with my team, a group of people born into different states, countries or cultural values from mine. With some, our friendships clicked immediately, while some I got to know gradually. These teens came from regions such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Florida, Louisiana, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and China.
It surprised me that I was not listening with jealousy but with pure curiosity about many of their accomplishments. In those short days before and after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, I was learning to believe in myself more than I have ever had. I really do not think they know what their friendships meant to me, or if they cared as much about me as I did them. By the Inauguration Day we had each other laughing so hard that I probably gained a six-pack of abs. I never slept on the buses despite my exhaustion because I knew my time would be short with them and it was too precious to waste.
The day of the Inauguration came. We all got out of bed at 4 a.m. and walked about the still-dark capital city. The morning sunlight was almost up when we arrived at the National Mall. There was barely room to sit. We held hands as we went through the crowds. People passed American flags and cheered at the screens. We camped out there for a while. Some people slept, some people took pictures the entire time and others fought to get to the bathrooms and food stands. It was amazing how silent the half-million people were. I just remember closed mouths and open ears, waiting expectantly.
I went to an Inauguration. I attended seminars and heard points of views from insiders at the White House. It was all so special, and I will be thankful for it every day of my life. But I think that what I took the most from this experience is that people are inherently similar and that acceptance of who we are amongst each other is vital to our success as a nation.
If you want to discriminate, or believe that you know everything about the human condition, politics or the world as a whole, you will not thrive. You may just need to get a slice of humble pie. People desire the company of other people who are willing to keep and open heart and learn. People need people who are optimistic. People need people who know respect. We cannot go on alone. We need each other.
It is difficult to get some of the youth today to care about politics. Their indifference is ignorant of their future at hand, and their friends’ futures. But we are not slow to care about other people. Caring should not stay idle. Caring is when people take action to create change for the ones they love that will benefit them collectively.
Before I left for this trip, I expected it to be all about business. I expected to be writing less of a diary and more of concept and ideas about our government system. But now when I see Abraham Lincoln’s words of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, I think of my friends. I cannot help but recall Jim Jones and Bill Frenzel’s friendship despite their political differences. I would look around at my friends and our differences, differences that would not pull us apart but make us stronger in leadership, and in the value of compromising. One day it could be us. We could be the leaders of the changing nations, and we have gotten a head start on understanding each other as individuals.
To honor your country, you do not have to go down with literal stars and stripes upon your death like my grandfather did, you do not have to be great politician. You should be you, but an effective participant politically. Read the paper, acquire as much knowledge as you can about the issues and vote, because you count. There are people we have never met that we will know and love one day, but to us now they are faces in a crowd. They will be affected. They will change your world, and change how you look at the people of the world and the free America, a country that is capable of aiding and lifting up the spirits of the people.
