July 4 has always been my favorite holiday since I was a young child running around Glen Arbor in the 1970s. I felt such pride being an American. Recently, our chef at the Cherry Public House told me that he saw a border patrol agent driving down M-22. He was miffed that they were patrolling Leelanau—200 miles from a border that happens to be the safest in the world. It is nerve-wracking for our foreign and local workers at Cherry Republic because we are a team and family and we don’t want to be broken up any more than the hard-working families we’ve seen on television torn apart in pools of tears these last six months. Cherry Republic is hosting a refugee family from Central America. The father has taken on the difficult job of stirring our four giant scalding jam and salsa kettles in our Empire plant. Unfortunately, because of the legal wrangling going on between the courts and The White House, our Central American refugees can no longer work. The pot stirrer in Washington shutting down the pot stirrer in Empire.