Gifts Given    

Pause right where you are and look around.  What do you see?  You are  reading this blog via internet, using electric lights and drinking coffee from one of your many and various mugs.  Look on your wall or desk.  A clock, pictures, and hopefully a Bible on the table close by.  You and I are enjoying and using so many of these “gifts” and we rarely appreciate them.

 I don’t know the names or faces of anyone who created most of these objects.    Thomas Edison and others are responsible for the light bulb and Steve Jobs and his crew brought me my laptop, but everything else comes to me anonymously, designed and put together by strangers someplace else.  But here’s what I do know:  all of these objects spring from one source: human ingenuity.

Many smart and inventive thinkers come from various societies around the world.  However, I’m proud of America! I often forget our own American ingenuity. 

Look at old Ben Franklin.  He gave us the lightning rod, bifocals and the Franklin stove, swim fins, and all those catchy sayings he printed up……..how about “the early bird catches the worm.  A penny saved is a penny earned.”

If you Google “American ingenuity” you will find dozens of websites discussing this topic. In Colonial days, we were a nation of tinkers, many of which point to ingenuity and invention as especially American. The early pioneers built houses, churches, roads and cities and repaired everything from muskets to harnesses and created tools and machines to ease their lives. 

Skilled pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson once wrote: “Before this country came on the scene, for thousands of years people did things the same way. Within 200 years of the advent of this nation, men were on walking on the moon, and I want us to recognize this is the kind of people that we are.  We’re creative with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of energy.” 

Time and again in our history, men and women have employed that ingenuity and energy to improve the lives of those around them.  We’ve built airplanes and cars; we’ve given the rest of the world computers and the information age; we’ve invented life saving drugs and surgical tools.  The list is almost endless. 

Of course, other countries have now met up with us with their own takes on much of our originality; however, I do believe that we might be called the first to really improve the lives of our citizens.  (Do I seem a big prejudiced?)

There are many reasons for these successes; A patent system that protects inventors.  The contributions of various immigrants like Alexander Graham Bell; an education system that worked; and a history of tinkering trying to come up with something that would solve a particular problem. 

But the greatest and most precious factor in our inventiveness, the one we must most closely guard, is our freedom.  Without our liberty, we will stifle innovation and development. 

That liberty, along with free enterprise, not stifled by the federal government, and with our inquiring minds and the human spirit, has brought a wealth of improvements to all of us.  Those same virtues will continue to do so if we in turn allow them to flourish! 

                                   God Bless America!