Mary Ricketson, Woman to Woman
Again, July 4, we celebrate our freedom. Either alone or with a few or many, we celebrate freedom that comes with living in the USA. We remember the beginning. Puritans left England to escape persecution based on religious beliefs different from the Church of England. Eventually the need for a new government was obvious. Our forefathers wanted a free country, no longer to be a colony ruled by England.
The declaration of independence was signed, the Revolutionary War was fought. We won, and we’ve been the United States of America ever since.
We do fight among ourselves, even though we value our freedom. We do have differing opinions about how alike we need to be, or how diverse we can stand to be.
We love our Statue of Liberty and its words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”
We know our nation was built on immigrants, but we’re not so sure now if any of them should still come.
We value our freedom of religion, but some of us think some of the rest of us are way too different now.
We know that Native Americans were here first, and we know the history of white settlers fighting them and displacing them, even by the forceful march on the Trail of Tears. We might know that a lot was wrong, but we disagree on what to do about it now.
And there was slavery, and strong opinions, and the Civil War, emancipation, eventually the civil rights movement. We keep trying to get better, and still we disagree.
We spent more than a century getting legal rights for women, starting with our right to vote in 1920.
We’ve recently undone many of our hard-earned rights. And we disagree. Of course, we disagree.
We are united by our right to vote. We solve and plan things with our vote. It’s the cornerstone of our freedom.
Please plan to exercise your right to vote in November.
Mary Ricketson makes her home in Cherokee County. She is a licensed clinical mental health counselor in private practice in Murphy. She has a special interest in women’s issues.