WORLD NEWS TRUST: I Think I Saw Tom Paine On The 4th Of July (Carolyn Baker)

[Tace]

These are the times that try men's souls.

~Thomas Paine~

July 7, 2008 (World News Trust) -- Everyone said I must attend a Fourth of July parade in New England. I yawned and thought of all the Fourth of July parades with which I'd been familiar while growing up in the Midwest-you know, the emphasis on God, country, mom, apple pie, and America right or wrong. I hadn't attended one since I was a very young child. But my friends assured me that it's different in New England, and especially in Vermont.

And so I went to what is traditionally the largest and most popular Fourth of July parade in the state, the one in Warren. I got up very early in order to get there in time to find a parking place which I was warned would be daunting. Like most rural Vermont towns, Warren resembles a small New England village during the days of the Revolutionary War with its white wooden-frame town hall, a narrow main street alongside a tiny, gurgling stream, and a few small shops of colonial architecture.

The Warren parade is traditionally quite political, especially this year as presidential, gubernatorial, legislative, and Congressional seats will be hotly contested in November. But what most impressed me was not the content of the parade, but the mood of the people participating and watching. Yes, I proudly marched in the parade with the Vermont Independence folks and handed out copies of their first-rate, newspaper, Vermont Commons, the style of which is not unlike those early colonial newspapers that served up an intellectual feast rather than the vending machine, mindless junk food of today's corporate tabloids.

In the throes of bands playing, crowds cheering, and walking alongside a man dressed as Ethan Allen, for a moment I was transported to 1776. In some towns throughout the colonies, little attention was paid to independence and the writings of Thomas Paine, but in Vermont, independence, not only from England but from other colonies, was always a front-burner issue. Hence this state's tradition of independent, sometimes iconoclastic, thinking.

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[Sequoia]

1. She said Tom Paine must be spinning in his grave.

No he's not because his bones were stolen.