No, those aren’t the signals you give at a restaurant if you want a steak or fish for your meal. They are the signals, lighting lanterns, given by the colonists of Boston to the American militia in order to notify them of the way the British troops were advancing – one lantern if by land, two lanterns if by sea.

From the simple lighting of the lantern and Paul Revere’s midnight ride announcing “the British are coming” came the battle at Lexington and Concord, where the shot heard around the world ignited a movement and put the 13 American colonies on a path to become the world’s superpower. The colonists didn’t know what that nation would look like, but they knew it would be theirs.

The ideas of freedom and liberty might sound like the words written on a modern Tea Party poster or the dusty words engraved in the bottom of a statue of a man whose name we no longer teach in school, but the words have never seemed more alive in the world.

We have seen uprisings of people in recent months in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and the wave of “people power” continues to sweep across the Middle East. We can only hope that these movements to overthrow corrupt dictators and inept leaders will lead to peaceful governments that respect human dignity, encourage expression and thought and improve the quality of life for its citizens. Of course, this shift from a dictatorship to a “government of the people” will not happen overnight and certainly will not be perfect.

America’s transformation was far from perfect and isn’t over. America took 80 years to acknowledge that slaves deserved freedom, 140 years to allow women to vote and another 40 years before “all men created are equal” became a reality in the land of the free.

I fear that we move so fast in America and expect everything to happen at the speed of a Twitter post that we forget that it takes actual men and women uniting together behind a common cause to begin the slow march of change. You can’t “tweet” a revolution. You must get up, join others and begin anew in creating the future you desire in the face of adversity, hardship and minor failure.

So, if you attend a tea party, wear a political shirt, or argue with a friend over whether or not America is doing the right thing, know that the founding fathers are smiling down on a nation where people can freely debate ideas without the fear of retaliation by their government; a nation where the lighting of a simple lantern can become the flaming torch atop the Statue of Liberty.

The last bite…

I ate in many places in Boston and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food. However, the service was far below the level of southern hospitality I am accustomed to in Louisiana. My favorite food was a tower of mango, lump crabmeat and avocado served at Chart House in the Boston Harbor (the site of the original Tea Party). I give Boston’s table service 2.5 (out of 5) crumbs!

Buddy Boe, a resident of Garyville, owns a public relations and program management company and is well known on the local political (and food) scenes. His column appears Wednesdays in L’Observateur.