Blue Collar Muse

My Alma Mater had a couple of interesting rites surrounding the event of getting engaged while in college. The ladies had it great. The guys … well, not so much.

When a gal got her engagement ring, she gave it to her dorm mother to keep for the day. That night, after curfew and with the dorm doors locked, the dorm mother walked the halls ringing a handbell announcing a Ring Ceremony. All the girls gathered in the lobby with the lights off. The engagement ring was tied to a lighted candle and passed from girl to girl to be admired. Once everyone had seen the ring, it went around again until it reached the girl it belonged to. She blew out the candle and put on the ring while her friends laughed, cried and did other female sorts of things appropriate to the situation.

Guys being guys, their congratulations were expressed with a bit more testosterone. The groom to be got no pleasant ceremony. He got a party - a Lake Party, to be specific. The town sported a not particularly large or attractive body of water. Any unfortunate getting engaged waited in suspense for his his friends to show up late one night, abduct him, take him to the lake and throw him in. It mattered not if he was studying, sleeping or romancing his intended. It was time for your Lake Party.

One young man thought to escape by transferring to another school. We simply drove there to fulfill our responsibilities. Stocky and strong and in the prime of life, he put up QUITE a fight, getting and giving his share of bruises and bumps, but we were a determined bunch. We trussed him up and tossed him in the back of a pickup for an hour long ride to a watery rendezvous. Today we’d surely be prosecuted for kidnapping but back in the day it was all great fun.

The exciting, thrill packed evening was only half complete at this point. Once ‘laked’, the lad was driven back to campus, stripped to his underwear and tied to the front porch of his fiancee’s dormitory. Every guy on campus waited there yelling and carrying on until the horrified and embarrassed young lady came out to untie her beau. At this point the festivities mercifully ended and we went back to studying and other activities more generally associated with conservative, faith based institutions of higher education!

This barbaric practice was half the reason I waited 10 years after graduating from college to get married. I was sure the guys would come for me, too, hundreds of miles away! It also took that long to find someone silly enough to accept my offer of a lifetime spent with yours truly! Ring Ceremonies and Lake Parties were part of the fabric of campus life. It mattered little that you knew the couple well or even liked them. They were engaged and there were traditions to be followed. Even a long term, bachelor college employee got his own lake party. He knew the tradition and when we showed up at his off campus house to get him practically ran to the vehicle to be driven to the lake. He needed no help into the water and took off swimming like it was his idea to be frolicking in his grunions in the water at midnight.

A silly thing for a grown man to do? Possibly, maybe even definitely. But our rites and traditions were important, almost sacred, to us. We would no more have excluded the man from his place in our lives than we would have rooted for the other team at Homecoming. Not to ‘lake’ an engaged guy or congratulate the gal at her Ring Ceremony wasn’t an option, for any reason. It simply would never have been done. To break that tradition would have damaged the community we were building and living in.

On a much larger scale, our nation has rites and traditions of its own. They used to be just as faithfully adhered to as our silly college rites but sadly, it seems many of them have been disregarded in favor of political expediency. Our lives and our national identity are reduced and impoverished because of it. The community we are building and living in is being damaged by it.

Politics used to end at the water’s edge. The loyal opposition used to work hard to be both opposing AND loyal. Election results used to be respected even if they were not the results one had spent months of labor to achieve. Once out of office, politicians used to leave the job of running the country to those actually elected to do the job. It used to be inconceivable that a politician would criticize the US while in a foreign country. Such were the rites and traditions of US politics.

Sadly, these rites and traditions are being discarded by a Democrat party more focused on accumulating power than on serving the public. The coarseness of the debate and the potency of the vitriol employed by the Left today is evidence of men driven more by hatred of one of their own than by hatred of their common enemy. Like a bull, enraged by the flag he never seems to hit no matter how often or how violently he tries, yet blind to and ignorant of the real threat of the matador’s sword which waits for the perfect moment for the killing thrust, the political Left methodically and maniacally pursues the evil that is ‘W’ and ignores the rising threat of Islam. No place, time or setting is inappropriate for disparaging this country, its leaders and its military. Any and all considerations, even that of party loyalty as evidenced by Democrat treatment of Joe Lieberman, are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

A former Democrat President, John F. Kennedy,

in his Inaugural address on January 20, 1961, presented the American public with a blueprint upon which the future foreign policy initiatives of his administration would later follow and come to represent. In this Address, Kennedy warned “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Today’s Democrats are cut from cloth that is merely similar to that of the man they quote and admire from the distance of history. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Shumer, Barney Frank and others on the Left are also prepared to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend and oppose any foe. But their purpose is assuring their personal survival and success, and that of their personal ideologies, even if their fight destroys liberty in the process. Would that we had more Democrats with the values and character of JFK, despite his flaws and failings. Led by a Democrat that respected our political rites and traditions, our country would be in better hands and headed in a better direction.

Hoping our great Republic has not suffered irreparable harm at the hands of those with their hands on the rudder of the ship of State …

Blue Collar Muse

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Conservative, Individual Responsibility, Liberal, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.