Fancy Farm
Saturday, I traveled to Western Kentucky to a political junkie’s Woodstock. Fancy Farm.
The St. Jerome Catholic Church Picnic, in Fancy Farm Kentucky, began in 1880. Happy Chandler is credited for making it the political event it has become known as today, when he visited the picnic in 1931, campaigning for lieutenant governor. He won that year, and believed Fancy Farm was his good luck charm, so he kept going back.
The first Saturday every August, this Western Kentucky town is overrun with political yard signs, politicians, news media satellite trucks, Tour buses and cars over taking yards surrounding the parish. And people, lots of people. Fancy Farm is a BBQ, Church fundraiser, reunion, and a political operative networking event. Everywhere you turn, there are Kentucky politicians, and campaign volunteers. Costumed Patriots, t-shirted supporters, families and the curious, all coming together for an event like none other.
This year’s Fancy Farm is of significance due to the national attention to the Kentucky United States Senate race. Incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell is being challenged by Democrats, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, and Ed Marksberry, and Tea Party newcomer Matt Bevin.
Yes the raucous rabble rousing ramps up as the speakers come to the stage, each candidate’s cheerleaders trying to out cheer and chant the other. The candidates trying to speak over the hecklers and the chanting. In our “civilized world”, this would not be acceptable, however, here at Fancy Farm it is expected. It is everything you have heard, or seen watching it live on KET or C-SPAN, but it is even more, experiencing it live. Things you miss watching it on tv.
There are two or three ideologies at play, the Republicans, the Democrats, Conservative, and liberal, with their distinct beliefs on how the country, and Commonwealth should be ran. Each side is very vocal at this event. It makes you wonder how we ever get anything done. Do we agree on anything?
And then it happens. All the yelling, name calling, and chanting gives way to the one thing that we all can agree on in harmony. The National Anthem. “Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?”
While the perilous fight and the at this political debate is not the fight Francis Scott Key wrote of, it can, at times, seem to be a battle with the verbal bombs we throw over the other side’s ramparts. Those broad stripes and bright stars are still gallantly streaming, that star – spangled banner still waves over a land that is free, and home of the brave to debate, argue and disagree on how to continue to make this, my old Kentucky home, a better state, and the greatest country on the face of the earth.