I would like to offer a vision of a new Independence day, a model that transcends the one currently enjoyed by the great unwashed and washed alike. What I mean by this new independence Day is independence from conventional thinking, independence from rote living, independence from government sanctioned behavior and independence from the inauthentic self.
If any fellow travelers out there have had the good fortune of reading Ernest Becker's meisterstuck Denial of Death you must assuredly know that nothing is absolute and "the best most of us can do is fashion something-an object or ourselves-and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak to the life force."
This is the great challenge as Becker saw it for Man. How do you fashion something positive, live independently and authentically in a world that compels us through existential inertia to embrace tenets and prejudices known deep down to be false.
Since nothing is absolutely absolute, you'd have to be God or the UnGod to know that, Man chooses a carefully outlined lie to live his life under. Thus the question arises, what is the best lie to live under? Is it homophobia, ethnic cleansing, tyrannical repression, antisemitism, solipsism? Maybe you are you the "chosen" leader of the most powerful country in the free world? Or the religious leader of 1 billion acolytes when in some other reality you would be in jail for aiding and abetting one of the most sordid crimes in modern times.
Each weltanschaaung rises out of our repressed feelings of insignificance paired with fear of the other and cognitive dissonance, the ability to find healthier meaning in an indifferent cosmos becomes almost impossible. Every country negotiates under these stimuli and the results through history are not very pleasant.
The new Independence Day would forsake bombast and hypnosis, honesty from it's elected leaders would be coin of the realm and the voices of its constituents would hold sway back to the time when this country was founded during The Age of Enlightenment, a period marked by "political aspiration towards governmental consolidation, nation-creation and greater rights for common people, attempting to supplant the arbitrary authority of aristocracy and established churches."
Not a bad lie to live under.