This hasn't been the kind of 4th of July essay I would have liked to have written -- or might have written in years gone by. But I'm too old and too disgusted to go through the motions of celebrating the national holiday...
-
Billmon
Bethany [my wife] is sitting in the background watching 1776, and I'm pondering the 4th of July. Independence Day, the day that the first 2 signatories of that declaration put their names on the dotted line. I'm far too cynical to buy into the myth - American independence was started by rich men who wanted more and found Britain standing in their way, no more, no less. But even if you believe, as I do, that the Declaration is just a well written piece of propaganda... it's a great piece of propaganda. And it's easy to understand how people buy into the myth. If anything, that Americans do so wholeheartedly when the Declaration so fully espouses human equality and self-worth should be a source of hope.
The Declaration, along with the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, despite their flaws, are probably some of the greatest documents ever penned by human hand, not because of what was intended at the time but because of what they have
come to represent. America has
never been a land of the free. It has never been a land of unrestricted liberty, and at times has been pretty draconian, discriminatory and oftentimes downright evil.
But what you can say about it is that it's still a country of ideals.
Those ideals have never been realised, but even in their phantasmic form, people are still called to what the Declaration and Constitution represent. Equality, justice, freedom, and individual self worth. Looking at America today, it's pretty hard to believe that those ideals are still alive at all - as Billmon says above, tribalism and "I'm better than you," nationalism seems to have taken over. But people here still believe in it. And people around the world, even if they've never heard of the Declaration, still believe in its principles. That's cause for celebration, of a sort. A dream, still, but hopefully one that won't die for a while, and even one which, if we're very,
very lucky may actually one day exist.
Cross Posted to Taxation Without Representation.