Hopefully this Fourth of July, you were with family, friends or both, drinking, grilling, watching fireworks and generally enjoying the freedom of a federally mandated three-day weekend and not constantly checking social media.
But if you were, and your timeline looked anything like mine, you probably noticed a gaggle of freshman-philosophy-major types sarcastically decrying the holiday, saying things like, “Yeah, let’s all celebrate the country that constantly invades others on false pretenses and kills huge numbers of civilians.” Or more likely, you saw that same text pasted in big block letters over a picture of a cat making a smug face.
But putting aside the source for a second, there’s a point there, isn’t there?
Considering what we’ve been through just in this past decade and a half, America can’t consider itself the beacon it would like to be for the rest of the world. We’ve suffered greatly, but have used that to justify causing great suffering.
The problem is we have for too long been a country with a chip on our collective shoulder. Where we used to lead the world, we have become reactionary, jumpy and desperate to flex our muscles. We refuse to let go of our national trauma and it drags us into unnecessary squabbles with ourselves and others.
With too much emphasis on what has come before us, we’ll be caught in a constant cycle of revenge and reparation, and any kind of real progress will become impossible. We can’t ignore history, but we have to accept it.
What I love about this country is that it was created with an eye toward constant improvement – by placing so much emphasis on abstracts like liberty and equality, the Founding Fathers ensured we would be in constant pursuit of them, never satisfied.
The Fourth should be a holiday of aspiration, not celebration. I’m not talking about some pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps pipe dream Reagan fetishists like to hold over the heads of the poor, but a simple aspiration to make this country act a little more human.
And we can’t move toward a better, more understanding country without first exorcising some of the ghosts of our past.
While President Obama promised America change, his presidency has felt less like the beginning of a new chapter of history and more like the end of an old one. Wherever you want to lay the credit (or blame), we’ve begun moving or gained momentum in issues Americans have clamored for for a long time – pulling troops from the Middle East, same-sex marriage, medical marijuana, enacting some kind of healthcare reform.
Whoever comes after Obama will no doubt have a fresh plate of catastrophes to deal with, but at least they’ll be fresh. What matters is not what comes our way, but the way we react to them. Approach new setbacks without grudges or prejudice and we may just find we’re living, right now, in a country worth celebrating.