Plain People

MY VIEW
Plain people everywhere make this country great
By JOSEPH XAVIER MARTIN

6/22/2006

Joseph Xavier Martin, of Amherst, admires those who give of themselves to help others.

It has become fashionable, when cities oppose each other in sporting contests, to trash the accomplishments of an entire city or region just to garner a cheap laugh. It happens to us in Buffalo a lot.

Some knucklehead, a self-styled, cynical and hard-bitten "big city reporter," will hold us up for the nation's ridicule. It doesn't matter what his name is or what paper he writes for.

Perhaps his career is faltering, or he resents people from cities like Buffalo who follow their teams with a passion. And yes, he obligatorily trashes our community as "plain and uninteresting" in the process.

Among those admirable people whom we call the Amish, there is a wonderful custom. When they wish to compliment a neighbor in the highest manner possible, they say that he or she is "very plain." What they mean is that the person works hard, honors his or her God and country and tries to be the best person he can be, without the need to call attention to himself or seek personal or public adornment.

When I think of this concept, I think of the many "everywhere-villes" across this great land of ours. I see and admire the small towns and the industrious farmers, the hard-working middle class and all the many others who give of themselves to their communities, their families and their country.

For it is they who are the rock upon which this nation was founded. The rugged pioneers, the faceless waves of aspiring immigrants and all of the other manifestations, emblematic of this great nation of ours, are among the "plain" people.

Thank God for them all. It was the "plain people" who stood shoulder to shoulder at Belleau Wood and Bastogne. It was the plain people who put aside the plow and the scythe to give everything they had so reporters could smugly call us "plain and featureless." Plain men and women, from working-class cities, who shed their blood in foreign lands so that all of us might enjoy the benefits that their courage bought for us.

And when one of them fell, their blood not only consecrated the ground upon which they died, but reconsecrated the ideas for which we stand and the country from which they came.

Many of them indeed are "plain and featureless." They are the corn-fed farm boys from Iowa and Nebraska, the hardy loggers from the Northwest and New England, the farmers from the Great Lakes states and the rural kids from the many Southern towns, with their musical drawls. All of these lads were plain and featureless, too, yet they are the face of America that some smart reporters find so dull.

For all of our faults, for all of our mistakes, America and its "plain people" are perhaps unique in all of history. We send the sons and daughters of our "plain people" not only to defend our own freedom, but to win it for others.

And when you walk by our national monuments in Washington, D.C., and see those 13 stripes and 50 stars flapping above them in the noonday sun, if your heart doesn't swell and your eyes mist over, then you have indeed lost the secret of who and what these "plain people" are all about.

The terms "purple mountains' majesty" and "amber waves of grain" mean something to each of us every time that we hear these words sung. They are a celebration of the "plain and featureless" among us, God bless them every one.