Areas of Unrest

4 July 2000 - Revel Without a Cause

QOTD: "Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved." - Martin Buber

Reading: Richard A. Lupoff, The Sepia Siren Killer

Listening to: Andy M. Stewart, By the Hush

It is amazing how restorative a few days of not having to set an alarm clock can be. I got somewhat caught up on assorted household odds and ends (filing and organizing, laundry, a 5 minute mending task that I've been putting off for about 8 months), read and listened to music. I still have a ton of things to do, including catching up on email. One message I need to answer is from John, who sort of asked for an explanation of the Fourth of July.

So I was thinking about how exactly one could explain the Fourth of July to a non-American. One of the things that makes that hard for me is that, had I been living at the time, I would almost certainly have been a Tory. And, frankly, I think that most people who are honest would answer the same way. There was simply no precedent for the Declaration of Independence. Asking for tax relief, sure. But a colony demanding independence from the mother country? Absurd! That would be treason!

From nearly two and a quarter centuries later, I'm quite pleased that those traitors took the actions they did. I know that patriotism is horribly unfashionable, but I think we have a damned good country. No, it isn't perfect. There are countries with a higher standards of living, lower crime, better education, possibly even with greater respect for civil rights. (The latter point is debatable, but there are issues about racism, for example, and capital punishment.) But what makes us unique is that we have established a system that allows our government to evolve, to grow to greater fairness. The flexibility in our Constitution is a truly remarkable achievement.

I will still probably answer John's question with the standard history text version of independence. I'll add a comment that nowadays the emphasis is on picnics and fireworks, on the revels and not the rebels. But I'll also thank him for making me think about what it means, giving me cause to stop and think beyond the parades and parties.