IT'S BUSTING OUT ALL OVER!

"June is busting out all over...." So goes the rousing Rogers & Hammerstein hit song from Carousel. But what's busting out this June is thunderously different than what I remember when the song was first sung in 1945...!

Back then, aside from the usual flowers and fireflies, there was victory and pride in the air. Americans were coming off the canvass from the Pearl Harbor punch of 1941 to soon land the massive knockout blow to both the Japanese and the Nazis. While the cast was still singing the song on Broadway, General Douglas MacArthur was standing on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay proclaiming the end of evil in the world. His lyrics boomed even louder than the cast's, because from now on every June would bust out all over with peace and harmony. From America to a standing-room-only world.

Sixty-four Junes have come and gone. Long enough to score how well we've lived up to the General's lyric. On balance, we've done worse than the dreamers had hoped, but better than the realists had dared to hope. As you stroll the June gardens of your neighborhood, you can study the swallow's flight and muse over the peonies' smile. They're both still here, as yet unconsumed by the terrifying mushroom cloud that ended that war. Despite the subsequent tragedies of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we have avoided World War III. In a dangerous world, avoiding can be as important as achieving.

Of course we have achieved much since then. Medical breakthroughs...electronic marvels....astronauts on the moon....the power of computers and cyberspace within the reach of virtually every hand on the planet. The ancient gods and emperors, not to mention the General, would gaze upon all this in awe. So do our poets and patriots, and let the record show some of this awe is well deserved. We are a disputatious but remarkable people who continue to climb new mountains even though we never fail to shoot ourselves in the foot on the way up.

Along with the achievements, something else is busting out this June. The school kids. Schooling is over, now dreaming begins. After all, summertime is absolutely, positively the most ebullient time for dreaming. Hanging from tree limbs, lounging on lawns, paddling in canoes, or just scratching pictographs in the dirt. True, some of these kids are prowling alleyways and peddling drugs, but the majority of them reject their darker selves and opt for their better selves. They dream of soon-to-be adulthood and careers and amazing headlines with their names in them. These baggy-pants June aficionados don't look it now, but they will be the winners and warriors of the Junes to come.

Now the June page on our calendars usually comes with pastoral scenes of life at its fattest most fruitful best. But wait. Notice the 30 empty spaces on there. Yes, for jotting in appointments. But more than that, like all empty spaces, they're meant to be filled out. Nature and Americans abhor a vacuum!

And so this June arrives like every other June -- except we haven't lived it before. The grand peace and promise we won by 1945 are the very same we need to keep winning in 2009. Neither come without work. Or without dreaming.