Independence Day

As I listen to the neighborhood fireworks that make my dogs (canines: Max and Beau) go nuts in fear and anxiety, and to the drunken frat boys in my Lincoln Park neighborhood on the night before our official Independence Day celebration, I can’t help but wonder if those revelers really understand what it is, exactly, that we are celebrating.

Call me a curmudgeon, a stick-in-the-mud, an old man; call me what you will. That’s fine. But, really? Is celebrating our independence about getting drunk and shooting off illegal fireworks? Now, don’t get me wrong – I can enjoy getting a nice buzz on as much as the next guy (and any of you who know me know that that’s true). But, what I don’t do is go out and get drunk for the sake of it and set off dangerous firecrackers in a neighborhood with many young children, or anyone else, can easily be hurt. What I don’t do is get wasted beyond all measure and leave beer cans and bottles in the front of other people’s houses (read: mine) and puke on their lawns. I don’t do any of that.

I have my own sins, my own vices, Lord knows. But I’ve never really understood why or how the fourth of July has turned into an excuse to be an asshole, to be inconsiderate, to be an unadulterated jerk. The fourth of July represents something truly extraordinary – if you know your history.

At the time that those men signed the Declaration of Independence, thirty thousand British troops were disembarking at a port on Long Island, not very far at all from Philadelphia. The signers were putting their signatures on a document for which they would be hanged, if caught, as traitors to the Crown.

What they did was truly courageous and it set in motion the Revolutionary War through which we secured our independence as a country. That act has inspired countless others (Ghandi, Mandela, even Dr. Martin Luther King) throughout the past two centuries all over the globe. And we honor it with illegal fireworks and drunken bacchanals? I know I’m sounding like the aforementioned curmudgeon I assured you I was not, but there’s something about this that sticks in my craw.

At the same time, I also revel in the fact that we are free to behave like jerks – as long as we don’t hurt anybody else. We are free to act in an immature or even disrespectful manner – that is our right, under the greatest Constitution that has ever been written. (Despite its many flaws, like, oh, only white land-owning males being accorded the right to vote and blacks being considered “property” or, at best, 3/5 of a person, but that’s a blog for another day.)

I’m proud of our country. I love our country. I celebrate our Independence. And, I’d like to think it means a little more than waving a flag and setting off Chinese made fireworks and grilling some wieners on the trusty ole Weber.

And let us never forget that the moment we take our freedoms for granted we are sure to lose them. We must always and forever remain vigilant to Abraham Lincoln’s ideal of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” That demands engagement, involvement, and attention. Not just shooting off fireworks and going on a bender once a year in the name of “celebrating” the fourth of July.

Sermon over.

Namaste.