Entry 62: 7.4.80 "Patriotism"

Ever been woken up by "Stars and Stripes Forever" blasting through a speaker a few inches away from your ear? Well, that was my morning today. I get that Vault-Tec is trying to play the hyper-patriotism route, but honestly not a ton of us are buying it. It's hard to take great pride in a country that's been blown to shit while also blowing most of the rest of the world to shit. In any case, despite the fact that for all intents and purposes the world above being absolutely wrecked by atomic fire, it's still nice to think about patriotism in a more healthy way.

I already talked about my family's annual July 4th celebration, but I don't think I've ever mentioned what we did for the tri-centennial. The tri-centennial, for anyone who doesn't remember it or know about it (I'm assuming someone else will read these logs eventually), was the three hundredth anniversary of the United States. It was a year before the bombs dropped, and at the time geo-politics were still pretty rough… But despite that my dad had managed to get the week off from work and take us all to Washington D.C. We spent most of the week just walking around and going to different museums. I think my favorite was the Smithsonian Museum of Technology.

I've always been into technology and science, and getting to see some of the stuff from American history that really changed the way people lived was inspiring. What was really amazing is how far we came in such a short period of time. The twentieth century was incredible! We went from the Wright brothers airplane to the Defiance capsule in a few decades. I guess it was also a bit less incredible in how we managed to build and perfect enough nuclear weapons to ruin the whole planet…

In any case, it was still pretty neat. It might be a few weeks until the next report, I'm swamped with working on the computer system, planning services and married life.