The Birthplace: Big F'ing Deal

Yesterday I saw an Ohio plate which, like all others, said, "Birthplace of Aviation." Long has Ohio pissed me off in this regard. 

The Wright Brothers were born in Ohio. Terrific. They labored on their ideas of flight in Ohio. Grand. Ohio is the home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and blah blah blah. Ohio's role in flight history is unquestionable. Yet its natives always neglect one thing:

The first flight ACTUALLY HAPPENED in North Carolina. 

Ask your parents where to find your birthplace. They won't tell you it occurred quietly in a Fort Lauderdale Motel 6 while your older siblings were asleep on the next bed. They'll say, "The Baptist Hospital," or "the back seat of our car," or whatever it says on your birth certificate. They say that because that was the place where you were ACTUALLY BORN. 

Your parents, like most people, understand that ideas don't count for shit, actions do. Nobody cares where Michelangelo thought about painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They just want to see the ACTUAL MASTERPIECE. 

So some guys thought up the moon landing in a smoky Houston conference room, or a smoky Washington Congressional office, or in a smoky lab at Cape Canaveral. Wherever it was it was certainly smoky, because a bunch of stressed scientists pressured by the government to beat the Russians to the moon in the 1960s are going to smoke a lot. Anyway, no one cares where they thought it up, just that the moon landing occurred, (shock) on the moon. 

Ask someone about D-Day. They won't know a damn about where Eisenhower & co. planned it, nor would it matter. A great idea is nothing without actions. The Wrights could have grown old and died with ideas about flying, but unless they took their Flyer to Kitty Hawk we might never have known their names. 

In 1802 Congress passed the Enabling Act. It allowed residents of the then-Northwest Territory to begin formal steps to its eventual statehood. Sure, this was but one step of many in bringing Ohio from a wilderness to a U.S. state. Most of the credit goes to the men and women who toiled on the land and populated it extensively enough to eventually reach statehood. They were doing the real acting in bringing the state of Ohio from an idea to a reality. 

In Washington it was merely a brainchild of politicians. Congress debated the ways to make Ohio a reality. Men like Charles Pinckney and Gouverneur Morris surely discussed theories about admitting Ohio to the Union. 

Hmm...ideas, debates, theories. This sounds familiar. Perhaps Washingtonians should start referring to their hometown as "Washington: Birthplace of Ohio."