America the Beautiful

As only Ray Charles can

Welcome to the wonderful world of music. Over the next few months starting today we will be having Patriotic Music Thursdays. Every Thursday I will be posting a new song of our country complete with a video, lyrics and a brief history of the song. Today we start with Ray Charles and his soulful rendition of America the Beautiful. I hope you enjoy and come back weekly to see what we’ve got in store for you.

Lyrics by Ray Charles

Oh beautiful, for heroes proved,
In liberating strife,
Who more than self, our country loved,
And mercy more than life,
America, America, may God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain devined.
And you know when I was in school,
We used to sing it something like this, listen here:
Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties,
Above the fruited plain,
But now wait a minute, I'm talking about
America, sweet America,
You know, God done shed his grace on thee,
He crowned thy good, yes he did, in a brotherhood,
From sea to shining sea.
You know, I wish I had somebody to help me sing this
(America, America, God shed his grace on thee)
America, I love you America, you see,
My God he done shed his grace on thee,
And you oughta love him for it,
Cause he, he, he, he, crowned thy good,
He told me he would, with brotherhood,
(From sea to shining sea).
Oh Lord, oh Lord, I thank you Lord
(Shining sea).

Take the time to give any suggestion for new songs you might like to hear by leaving me a comment. I look forward to hearing from you.

An Inspirational Reflection

My Freedom was Flying



The eagle is my soul



The year was 1997; I was 17 and had been living on my own in northern Michigan for about a year. I was renting a room in the garage of a bicycle repairman and spending most of my days working at a car wash or chasing clouds.  My sister and I had been talking and getting to know each other better over the phone for a while and she thought it might be nice if I moved down to Ann Arbor to share rent with her. I had never lived in a city before and thought a change in scenery might be good so I agreed. She drove the three hours to pick me up about a week later and from there my adventure begins.

The first day after arriving at my sister’s I went out to find a job.  A 17 year old with no driver’s license is pretty limited by who will hire them, so I learned the bus routes and focused on fast food. I got my first job by noon at a Pizza Hut and kept looking. The price of city rent was much more than what I was used to and one job just wasn’t going to hang it. I just kept on riding the bus and getting of whenever we passed by shops and restaurants. I found my second job at about 4:30 that afternoon as a taco stuffer at a Taco Bell near the airport. I spent the next few weeks riding my bike three miles to Pizza Hut in the morning, taking the bus to Taco Bell in the afternoon, riding the bus back to my first job in the evening and then riding my bike back home. I was doing everything right, but I needed to expand my horizons if I didn’t was to be a very bitter person one day.

One Friday when I had off from my second job I went to the airport to see about getting some flying lessons. They had an in house ground school that met every Tuesday and Thursday between 7:00 and 10:00 at night for $120.00, and I happened to have the money on me so I jumped on it. From that point on I either went to school after my second job or rode the bus for a few hours to study. My life was so busy there was no time for anything else, but I was happy in knowing I was going somewhere. The class was two months of aviation theory and FAA rules. It was two months of preparation for the chance to experience my first time flying. Class seemed to creep by at an unusually slow pace in anticipation for what was to come. I couldn’t wait to fly. When the actual flight lessons did start it was going to cost me $60.00 an hour though so I used that time to save every penny I had and focus only on the task at hand.

The day had come. Ground school was over, and I was standing in front of the Cessna 172 single prop aircraft that was soon going to be under my complete control. My flight instructor Dave walked me through my first ground check where we made sure the bird was fit for flight and topped off the fuel. We climbed into the cockpit donning our headphones to continue our preflight checks. I tested all the instrumentation and then fired her up making sure the magnetos were firing correctly. We sat there for a moment while he talked to the tower letting them know this was a training flight and asking permission to start taxiing while my knees shook and I kept going through everything in my mind. We got permission to start our venture and were soon parked at the entrance to the runway waiting for traffic to clear. I was pushing the toe breaks so hard I couldn’t feel my feet. Dave gave me control of the radio and my voice cracked as I said “Tower this is flight November Tango Whiskey requesting permission for takeoff.” The tower gave me permission and I let off on the toe breaks to steer us into the middle of the runway. I set the flaps to full as I pulled the throttle fully out and we began picking up speed. The runway was rushing by and I could feel the aircraft getting lighter on the ground as a euphoric tingle shot through my bones. We were going nearly 90 mile an hour when I pulled back on the controls and began our initial clime. My whole being was somehow connected to this ultimate machine of adventure, and my spirit was screaming in delight over the rush of adrenalin coursing through my veins. My time spent in preparation for this moment was suddenly and exceedingly well paid for. I was free like the proverbial bird. I was a man with a destiny and the only thing to quench my desires was this new found freedom. My life was changed that day in the cockpit. My boundaries were stretched beyond ever shrinking back. My soul was alive and I was free.     

Please feel free to leave any comments relating to what inspires you or how you've seen others become inspired.

Use your Vote Responsibly

Vote with a full deck.

Why your vote counts

 It can be easy to get sucked in to the idea that your vote doesn’t matter. Some people go as far as to say that elections are rigged from the start. But when it comes right down to basic third grade principles, those who don’t participate get left behind. The 2010 election cycle saw the republicans make a record setting comeback to holding the congressional majority. In past years the democrats have done the same. So what can we learn from the fact that who is in power now will not necessarily be who is in power tomorrow? I think the most important lesson learned from massive takeovers in the house is that when people come together and vote there is nothing a politician can do but wait to see if they still have a job tomorrow. 

Sometimes it's true

What to watch out for

With such power in your hands as to change the direction of your country, it is important to make a decision you can live with in the morning. It is the politician’s job during an election however to appeal to as broad a section of the population as possible. This is why they never fully answer questions and tend to speak in generalities. There are two tactics used by politicians’ to gain your vote that can lean very heavily toward the wrong side of the truth. The first thing is they will form coalitions. A politician will only form a coalition with a group or organization if there are votes in it for them, and you can rest assured that no vote was ever given for free. The second potentially dishonest tactic used by politicians is the use of hot button issues. While there are hot button issues that really matter to our country such as healthcare and spending, there are many more issues that only seem important because the amount of emotion involved makes everything else cloudy. There are some things a politician can say they stand for or will fight for that is meant to invoke an emotional need for you to vote for them.

How to make your vote count

Now that you have a small idea of what you’re up against what can you do to make sure a politician is on the up and up with their coalitions, and how can you stop from being sucked into an emotional vote? When it comes to coalitions you can start on a candidate’s website if you just want to see what they’d like you to know. But all too often we must dig deeper in order to see what lies beneath. One way of doing this is to type link: directly followed by the URL of their website into your Google or Yahoo search box. This will display all the URL’s of people and organizations who are sending traffic to the website in question. By clicking on the links you will be taken to the page linking to the candidate where you can see why they are sending the candidate traffic and what they think of the candidate. Rest assured that if your candidate says they are for small business but are hiding the fact that they are in coalition with a union, they might just have a conflict of interest.

Not getting sucked into giving an emotional vote is much more personal, and although I am pointing out some of these hot button issues this is not the forum to discuss them in great detail. One such hot button topic designed to evoke an emotional vote is abortion. While it might seem good to vote for someone who is on your side of the fence regarding such an issue you have to ask yourself if there are any other reasons to give them your vote. A good sign that a candidate is trying to get your emotional vote is that the things they are running on create heated debates where no one person can ever win. Many of these topics in one form or the other have been argued for thousands of years and will continue to be debated so long as we are free.

 Possible hot button topics

• Abortion
• Pro-Life
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Welfare
• Capital Punishment
• Sanctity of Life
• Embryonic Stem Cell Research
• Separation of Church and State
• Same Sex Marriage
• Poverty
• War

These hot button issues often provoke highly emotional responses in the average voter and are used to gain votes without providing further substance. It is dangerous to hand your vote over regardless of a candidate’s views on other subjects, but that is the aim of any candidate running on an emotional ticket.

It’s up to you

In the end it is up to you and you alone who you vote for. And no one should ever tell you who to vote for. It is not always possible to know exactly who you are voting for. It is however possible to educate yourself sufficiently as to not get caught up in the distractions a candidate might through your way. I challenge you to use the tactics I have suggested the next time you get ready to vote. I challenge you to never vote a straight ticket. I challenge you to learn just one thing about a candidate that they might not want you to know before voting. And I further challenge you to get your children involve in family discussions about how important there vote is. If we all learn to pay better attention to who we are voting for we will no doubt end up electing stronger candidates who are there to do our bidding not their own.

I look forward to reading your comments on this topic. I am especially interested in knowing what other hot button emotional topics you think candidates use to cloud voters judgment. If you have any tips on what to look out for that would be appreciated as well.