By Edwin Cooney
Of course, all seasons of every year are by circumstance and definition vital to humanity. However, there’s something about the fall of the year that’s particularly exciting. Like everyone else, I’m aware of the significance of events that occur every day of the year. However, try as I promise you I do to find events of equal significance elsewhere, the fall of the year, at least since the end of World War II, has been particularly vital in our lives culturally, socially, politically, and perhaps even spiritually.
First, as the sun crosses the autumnal equinox, baseball fans everywhere are anticipating the league playoffs and the World Series. Football, basketball, and hockey fans are anticipating the opening of new seasons. Schools and colleges are opening. New clothes and new automobiles come on the market, designed to respond to consumer conveniences, desires and demands.
The delights of autumn encompass our creativity and our need for distraction from the constant humdrum of reality. Thus we offer Thanksgiving, revel in the goulash imaginings of Halloween, celebrate the questionable significance of Christopher Columbus, pay homage to the sham peace of World War I, and pretend that commercialism and spirituality are equally integral parts of Christmas or Hanukkah!
As the weather cools, we munch apples (the tarter the better), swill down hot chocolate, along with cider and doughnuts, toast marshmallows, and just know they’re as good for you as grandmother’s coleslaw.
Cool days and nippy nights, crackling fireplaces and brewery delights beckon us to football fields and hockey fights. At the same time, with a gladness reminiscent of the days when all that mattered was who you were dating and what thrill might be awaiting beyond college goal posts and fall spooning rites, we studiously prepare for tomorrow’s falls.
Meanwhile, back to the real world. Some of our finest patriots were born during the fall. They include Dwight Eisenhower (Tuesday, October 14th, 1890), Teddy Roosevelt (Wednesday, October 27th, 1858), Jimmy Carter (Wednesday, October 1st, 1924), and great New York Yankee teammates and friends Edward Charles (Whitey) Ford (Sunday, October 21st, 1928) and Mickey Mantle (Tuesday, October 20th, 1931).
Since 1894, all identification of fall in the United States has commenced with the celebration of Labor Day even though still within summer solstice. It was President Grover Cleveland’s sop to the American working men and women whom he betrayed when he called in federal forces to break up the Pullman’s Strike in July 1894. What is more significant about the origins of Labor Day, however, is that even with the presidential proclamation there was nothing official about it. Working folks had to take an unpaid day off from work to celebrate their own unity and significance.
Labor Day picnics (and, at one time, parades) mark the close of summer vacation and the opening of schools. Even more, however, I think they bring on a vital expectation that alerts us to unfinished tasks and expanding opportunities. Fall, even as it signifies the end of the growing season, energizes and nourishes the future. Some animals go into hibernation so they may awaken renewed and sometimes transformed as splendid examples of nature’s mystery and majesty.
As the fall of 2017 approaches, we may well take comfort from some of the social and political challenges that have occurred during past fall seasons. Here are just a few:
September 1945 saw victory in World War II. Fall 1946 marked the close of the Republican party’s political minority in Congress since 1930. In 1948, national Democrats took pride as Harry Truman was re-elected president over GOP Governor Thomas E. Dewey in an election he was expected to lose. In 1954, the United States Senate, which still had a majority of Republicans, nevertheless censured fellow Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for behavior injurious to the United States Senate — thus ending a period of accusation and injustice against Americans who were vulnerable to guilt by association. The fall of 1964 saw the Soviets banish Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Perhaps most gratifying was the fall of 1989 when Soviet oppression crumbled all over Europe amidst the happy destruction of the Berlin Wall.
The fall season has had its fair share of tragedies such as the November 22nd 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and the horror of 9/11 in 2001.
Over all, however, the fall of the year bathes us in a zesty aura of possibilities that we would dismiss at our peril.
For those of us born in the fall of the year, there is that special opportunity to rethink and thus revive old dreams as we revise our priorities for the purpose of mastering the beckoning future.
As we examine the favors of the fall of the year, we can, if we will, appreciate the gifts granted to all of us from the other seasons of the year.
Life is a continuum. To genuinely celebrate any part of it invariably forces us to appreciate and be thankful for all of life and the seasons which frame the fullness of time.
I’m energized by being a child of the Fall! Among my fondest wishes is that the rest of you could be so lucky to have been born during that fairest season of them all — the season we call Fall!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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