By Caleb Jones
JEFFERSON CITY – My little girl Charleston isn’t so little anymore. This past week, we celebrated her 11th birthday. As I was tucking her in the night before, I could feel the excitement. She had big plans for her special day. Thankfully, she looks like her mother, but I knew she was my daughter when she requested a mechanical bull at her birthday party.
Birthdays are one of those milestones you either love or hate. Oftentimes, it’s both at the same time.
The more birthdays I have, the more I’ve realized each one is special in its own way. When you’re young, birthdays mean friends, presents and parties. As a kid, I remember trying to stay up until midnight so I could be the first one to wish my brother happy birthday. When I was 15, the next birthday meant freedom – or at least the promise of it – through a driver’s license.
Then, as you get older, birthdays can start to lose their shine. They become less about something you celebrate and more about something you endure. Instead of counting candles, they start counting years.
For some people, birthdays become so scary they start looking for shortcuts to stay young. There is an entire industry built around people wanting to look like they quit having birthdays. But much like taxes, birthdays are not something you can stop.
This Fourth of July, we have a special birthday to celebrate. It marks our country’s 250th anniversary.
It is easy to forget all the amazing things that have happened over the last 250 years in the United States. We have cured diseases, built roads, bridges and buildings that still amaze the world. We can climb into a big metal tube with wings and fly across the country faster than it takes me to smoke a brisket. We ride horses for fun instead of for transportation. We can talk to someone across the world from a phone in our pocket.
Birthdays may only last one day, but they celebrate a whole life. On July 4, let’s celebrate our amazing country. Here we put candles on cakes for children to blow out instead of using them to light our homes.
America isn’t perfect. No birthday party ever is. Somebody burns the hot dogs, a kid cries over the wrong piece of cake and, if you’re at my house, there may even be a mechanical bull involved. But that doesn’t mean the day isn’t worth celebrating.
I hope you’ll join me this summer in celebrating all that has been accomplished in the last 250 years. We can be honest about our challenges and still be thankful for the gift we have been given.
Happy birthday, America. May your next 250 years be filled with freedom, opportunity and, thanks to your local electric cooperative, reliable lights for when it’s time to blow out the candles.
Caleb Jones is the CEO of Missouri Electric Cooperatives. He is a member of Boone Electric Cooperative. Email him at cjones@amec.coop.