When something is taken away, you have a new appreciation when it returns. This morning is no exception. After having to leave paradise for a few days on business, it’s wonderful to be home.

I value my time here in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, sitting on the octagon-shaped screen porch — the same one pictured in an old torn sepia photograph from 1899, when this house was built on the lake. In those days everything was formal, unlike lake life today. It was women in long white dresses, big hats, and parasols, the men in straw hats and suits, stepping into a wooden boat, ready to row to the other lake for a lakeside church service. I feel the privilege of carrying on the tradition of morning tea on this porch, where they sat 127 years before me.

History Relived

The people in the 1890s came here for the same reasons I do: a break from the city, cooler air, and time with family and the lake friends they reconnected with each summer. Their gatherings, usually cocktail parties, required a tux or a coat and tie. Ours are usually just a casual shirt and shorts.

Less formality has made room for something better: actually seeing people, instead of their costumes. Sometimes I think people hide behind their designer clothes and high-end watches to send signals that “I’m better.”

Mr. Social

Though I started out shy and quiet, I believe I was born to be a social animal. And summer brings lots of opportunities to listen. I love meeting new people and hearing what they’ve done with their lives. 

In my younger, more eager and insecure days, I was more interested in telling my own story. These days I feel less need to feed my ego. Most people love talking about themselves, and I love giving them the chance. I always learn things. This past week, for instance, I learned nearly everything there is to know about the challenges of raising cattle, something I’d never otherwise understand.

Don’t Do This!

“In polite society, you never ask someone what they do for a living,” I was told once. “The challenge is learning as much as you can about someone, and getting them to tell you about themselves without ever asking what they do.” Though I care less about the rules of polite society these days, I still treat it as a personal challenge: how much can I learn without asking the “What do you do for a living?” question.

Someone once told me that people ask “What do you do?” to assess whether you’re worth talking to. I hear that a lot. They ask, I answer, they say something nice and find a quick excuse to move on, as if they’re screening for new clients or people who fit their mold. If someone’s sizing me up for my usefulness to them, I’d rather not waste my breath. After all, I’m useful to everyone 🙂

The Gift of Gab

My dad had a tremendous gift for getting to know people. He could talk to anybody, at any level, and make them feel heard and special, not because he wanted something, but because he was genuinely interested. Around our small lake town, I still run into people who tell me he made them feel special. That’s rare. I wish I had those skills.

What I loved about him is that he never judged anyone. No one was below him. He held his own with people some would perceive as “more important” as well as with those who might feel they are at the bottom of the food chain. He treated everyone the same.

Dressing Down

Sometimes people judge you not only by what you do, but by how you look. My dad taught me to always be dressed at least as well as the average at any event I was attending. “Always have at least a sport coat,” he’d tell me, though he was mortified when I wore one with jeans, since he’d grown up on a farm, where jeans were for work, not for dressing up.

An art dealer in New York once told me about a man in flip-flops and a T-shirt he’d snubbed as a time-waster. He was used to people wandering into his gallery and treating it like a museum, a place to look at paintings and ask questions, with no intention, or ability, to buy. He’d wrongly assumed the T-shirt guy was one of them, until the man came back two weeks later and spent half a million dollars on paintings.

Hidden Gems

Then there’s the guy I met recently working in a car repair shop, looking and acting like a regular grease monkey. I struck up a conversation, starting with old cars, which led to what he’d done before: he told me he was the retired CEO of a big company, and he worked at the shop simply because he loved working on cars. His co-workers have no idea he once had hundreds of people reporting to him, and he probably prefers it that way.

Leveling Out

I grew up around modest, God-fearing people who lived this out. They weren’t just tolerant, they were something better: levelers, people who saw everyone (the banker and the woman cleaning the floors) as equally worth their time. Judge not, or you’ll be judged. No matter who we are, or our station in life, we are all equal and deserve to be treated as such.

Farming New Crops

These days, the instinct to judge people we haven’t bothered to know is only getting more pronounced. Social media has built an entire business model on it. There are click farms where hundreds of people are paid to manufacture judgment at scale: hateful content, tailored to an agenda, rewarded with cash for every view. I once met a man who described visiting a click farm with 200 people sitting at computers doing nothing but pumping out political propaganda. If you repeat something enough times, across enough accounts — some of which might be the same people wearing different masks — people start to believe it, especially once they see others agreeing. He told me these people even comment on their own posts pretending to be someone else, just to make people who see it feel like they’re not alone.

I try to help my kids see that what they’re clicking on might not be true, and that the more they click, the more of that same content gets placed in their feed, reinforcing what they already believe. In this age, when even “facts” seem distorted, it’s important to intentionally seek out other points of view. 

Rich Rewards

We wouldn’t judge the man in flip-flops, the grease monkey, or the woman cleaning the floors if we actually sat down and learned about them. But that’s exactly what a click farm is built to prevent us from doing with people we’ll never meet: whole groups reduced to a stereotype, repeated until it feels true. It’s the same shortcut, the same failure of imagination, just multiplied by a couple of hundred people at computers.

That’s the discipline this porch keeps teaching me, 127 years running. Whoever sat here in these old wicker chairs in 1899 couldn’t have imagined a click farm, but they’d have recognized the temptation it feeds: deciding someone’s worth before you’ve actually met them, and making it all about you.

Digging for Gold

Keep in mind that everyone you meet has a story worth hearing. Everyone has the same hurts and some of the same challenges, the same insecurities, and we’re all just a wounded child on the inside. If you dig, you’ll find a fascinating story in everyone you meet. 

Eric Rhoads

The sun came up this morning with a pink so loud it practically needed its own soundtrack. I’m not exaggerating … we get skies up here in the Adirondacks that look like somebody spilled a watercolor set across the whole sky and then apologized by making it even prettier.

Myth or Truth

There’s an old story about the Hudson River School painters getting raked over the coals by critics who said their Adirondack skies were too vivid to be real … that no sky on earth looked like that. The painters swore up and down they were just painting what they saw. Sitting on this porch with my coffee this morning, I’m inclined to take their side. Something about a million protected acres, no smokestacks, and enough altitude to get you a little lightheaded apparently makes for a sky that looks like it’s showing off. I don’t know the science. I just know I believe the painters now — and I never believed anybody who said their fish was “this big.”

Close Neighbors

Speaking of the porch … it’s a good one. Screened in, looking out over the lake, and this morning the houses that were dead quiet a week ago are suddenly full of racket. Good racket. Laughter carrying clean across the water like the people are sitting in the chair next to you instead of a quarter mile away. Somebody’s having breakfast. Somebody’s easing a canoe out before the water skiers show up and turn the lake into a washing machine. It’s the sound of a holiday waking up.

Three Generations

My own Fourth of July memories start on Lake Wahbasee in Indiana, where we were third-generation lake people before “lake people” became a personality trait you see on T-shirts. My father and his grandfather used to sit for hours in an old metal rowboat, fishing and presumably solving none of the world’s problems but enjoying the attempt. My grandparents eventually parked their Airstream on a lot across from the lake, and years later traded it in for a little cottage. My folks followed suit and bought our first family place when I was 16.

Family Gathering

Everybody came for the Fourth. Both sets of grandparents, cousins by the carload, my brothers, friends who just showed up because word got around. We ate hot dogs, baked beans, and my grandmother’s secret potato salad … a recipe nobody has ever successfully duplicated, though I will go to my grave insisting it had a full cup of sugar in it and she just never admitted it.

Scattered Family

I cherish that memory every single Fourth of July, and I have never once managed to recreate it, because everybody’s scattered now and getting a crowd like that together has gotten a lot harder. Yesterday we had just one of our three kids here, who pulled off a small miracle escaping work for a couple of days. The other two couldn’t make it. That’s just how it goes now.

Freedom Recognized

Here’s the thing about freedom … I never really appreciated it. It was just there. Teachers talked about it in school. It got mentioned in speeches. TV pundits always talked about it. But when something is always there, it stops registering as remarkable..

A Fresh Viewpoint

Turns out, freedom is remarkable … I just needed to see its absence to recognize it.

That started for me on a trip to Czechoslovakia, visiting my wife’s family during the height of communism. It was an eye-opener in the worst way. Life was hard, everyone struggling, everyone afraid. Neighbors curried favor with the government by turning in neighbors. People simply vanished for the crime of pushing back on a local official. No trial. Gone forever. Our family there couldn’t trust anyone, because saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could cost you everything.

A later trip to Russia reinforced it. Even after communism officially fell, the fear hadn’t fully left the culture. Nothing like the Soviet era, but the residue was still there. And Cuba was worse than all the others combined.

A Bad Example

One artist I met told me about his father, also a painter, who refused to paint the propaganda version of Russian life he was ordered to paint. Instead he painted the truth of what he saw. After one especially pointed piece, he was arrested and executed. His crime was having an opinion the government didn’t approve of. That was the biggest eye-opener for me, meeting a contemporary who was impacted while I was alive. Not past history, but very real and in my face. 

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to a lot of corners of the world, and more than a few people who’ve lived through the loss of their freedoms have quietly told me the same thing: America is showing some of the same early warning signs they saw before things went sideways where they lived. Protect it at all costs, they warn.

Experts once predicted a republic like ours couldn’t survive a hundred years. We’re 250 years in. Good job, everyone. 

Alarming Trends

It’s sobering to watch places like the United Kingdom criminalize opinions and statements of fact on social media, relabeled as “hate speech” by whoever’s holding the microphone that year. Seeing “regular people” go to prison for sharing an opinion is something I never thought I’d see, especially there. Some countries have made it illegal to quote certain Bible scriptures out loud, with imprisonment to follow. 

Where That Leaves Us

America has plenty of flaws. Our leaders have always been human and flawed. But the fact that we’re allowed to say so … loudly, publicly, without a knock on the door at 2 a.m. … is not a small thing. Freedom is not normal in most of human history, and it’s still not normal in most of the world today.

Sadly, political differences are breaking up friendships and families, because it’s become the norm to ghost anyone you disagree with rather than just disagree with them. I applaud anyone standing for what they believe … but it’s a slippery slope when we stop allowing discussion or discourse altogether. Families have disagreed over politics since the founding of this great land, for 250 years running. Losing that ability would be a tragedy.

And honestly, that’s kind of what a family reunion like July 4th is all about. Every year we seem to argue about something … politics, or that potato salad recipe. Half the family swears it’s a cup of sugar, the other half insists Grandma would never slip sugar in, and nobody has ever once produced the actual recipe card to settle it. We’ve been loudly, cheerfully wrong about that potato salad for decades, and not one person has ever been arrested for their opinion on it.

In a Nutshell

That’s the whole deal, right there. A free country is just a big, messy family reunion where everybody’s allowed to be loudly wrong about something … family recipes, politics, the neighbor’s fireworks starting too early, the color to paint the house, or the way our kids are being taught. Nobody gets hauled off for it. Nobody disappears for saying the sky looked pink and someone else insisting it looked orange.

We got 250 years out of an experiment nobody thought would last a hundred. That’s not an accident, but it’s not a guarantee. We all hold responsibility for the maintenance job, and every one of us is on the crew. So argue about everything. Just don’t let anybody convince you that arguing is the problem. Silencing other opinions is the problem. Use the freedom while you’ve got it, and don’t let it go quiet on your watch.

Eric Rhoads