Today is the Fourth of July.
Arguably the pinnacle of patriotic American holidays.
When you strip away the barbecues, the picnics, the fireworks, the oom-pah-pah of patriotic tunes, what you are left with is a day commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence--the document marking the establishment of the United States of America.
It is a day on which Americans are expected to set aside fears, doubts and injustices and fill themselves with patriotic fervor and red-white-and-blue pride.
And burgers. Lots of burgers.
But my heart is too full of fear for our country right now and my mind cannot set aside the doubts. Make no mistake, I love this country
for what it could be. For the potential and hope I still manage to see.
Disagree with me if you wish, debate me if you must and hate me if you choose, but I feel that this Fourth of July is diminished and stained with the waves of intolerance, hatred, greed and egotistical pomp that spreads like a contagious disease.
It is easy to blame President Trump for this. Logical even. He's the main man after all. The policy maker, the holder of laws.
President Trump is a handy scapegoat for the simmering, ugly underbelly of America that has dogged our heels since the creation of this country.
The rise of President Trump has made me feel impotent, powerless and hopeless. I don't know how to defend myself and my country against those who support President Trump, masking their intolerance, hate and fear behind bland word games.
For the supporters of President Trump, it's all about subjective reinterpretation. The turn of a phrase.
When President Trump (and his cabinet members) lie, it's "telling it like it is".
When President Trump insults world leaders, it's " honest expression of his opinions".
When President Trump blurts out spontaneous, ill-considered and many times outright ignorant statements, verbally or on Twitter, he's being "genuine".
In my cynical moments, I find myself wondering what turn of phrase will pop up when President Trump has destroyed our global trade relationships, made the United States a worldwide laughingstock and has taken us to the brink of nuclear war.
So yes, for those of us who did not vote for President Trump it's easy to lay the blame on him. Rather logical even. He's the spark that lit a national fuse that Americans tried to believe didn't exist anymore (well, let's be honest--mostly white Americans)
But we cannot throw out the easy blame.
Trump, like the King of Great Britain 241 years ago, might be the spark, but we are the fuse that is allowing itself to be lit. And the flame at the end of that fuse is blowing right back in our faces.
As I considered sparks and fuses, my mind went back to other sparks and fuses in our history.
Back to the spark and fuse that compelled a bunch of irritated, educated and moneyed white guys to thumb their noses at the King of Great Britain and start a new country.
This country.
So on this day, this Fourth of July, I decided to read the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence wasn't--and isn't-- without its issues.
For one thing most of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. The deep irony of drafting and signing a somber document demanding "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" while at the same time being a men who actually owned other humans as property was not lost on the founding fathers. Most of the sources I found described the many debates and disagreements that hinged upon this very fact.
Finally they had to agree to disagree. A copout if I ever heard one, agreed to for expediency's sake I expect as they tried to "see the big picture", not realizing that nearly all "pictures" are the big picture, depending on one's perspective.
But I digress.
For another thing, we need to remember that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were men. Humans. As capable of imperfection and nobility as any of us. One does not need to dig too deeply to find stories of our founding father's mistakes, scandals and missteps.
I say this not to diminish their achievement or belittle their characters, but to point out that if these men, these educated and inspired but flawed and imperfect men could spark the beginnings of a new country, then surely we, 241 years later, could spark a revitalization of that same country.
So I felt compelled to read the document upon which this country, this government and this day was founded. The document that these men wrote and signed and in which they, at least conceptually, believed.
The Declaration of Independence is a startlingly short document--shorter than a typical high school essay assignment. Through the dated language one can feel the earnest anger from which it was written--the feelings of desperation and betrayal aimed at the ruler of the land from which the writers and signers came.
I can relate.
The grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence struck me as not unlike the grievances many Americans have now against our current president, Donald J. Trump.
I actually engaged in a bit of folly and re-interpreted the Declaration of Independence, aiming said grievances not at the King of Great Britain of 1776, but at President Donald J. Trump of 2017. It took surprisingly few word changes to shift the focus of this revered document.
Surprisingly few.
Just as it takes surprisingly little to either bring us together as a country or to splinter us apart.
Our country is a balance. A huge, interconnected, interdependent balance that is constantly shifting to one side or another and seldom--if ever--held at that magical point of equilibrium.
And on this balance, we are all connected. We are connected across the history, geography and definition of this American nation as citizens just as surely as we are connected as a species across this earth. Our days of being independent have passed. We are tied together--person to person, state to state, country to country-- through our shared existence and humanity, through our beautiful, ailing planet and in no small way through the lightning speed of the internet.
We are interdependent.
The boundary lines between countries, provinces, states and cities are fictional. Divisive lines dreamed up by humans and in existence only thanks to our shared hallucination that the lines are there.
The lines are not there.
We put them there.
Just as we put in the lines that divide us from each other.
And in all our interconnected, interdependent, balanced-slightly-out-of-balance lives as humans, I ask what I always ask.
Why?
Sources:
https://www.constitutionfacts.com/content/declaration/files/declaration_aboutthesigners.pdf
https://www.usconstitution.net/declarsigndata.html
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-and-Slavery-1269536
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084726/quotes
