Plenty of individuals feel uncomfortable at the fanfare explosion that typically accompanies Independence Day weekend in the United States. Maybe, at a time when our country is dramatically shifting, we should keep our celebrations respectful, if not somber.
#teaparties and Confederate flags maybe aren’t the best way to celebrate a nation whose hard work has led her to unprecedented success. A nagging sense that America does not have long at the apex of global politics and economy tends to make our cries of “America is number one!” considerably louder, or forced-sounding, than before — or maybe, given our increased consciousness of our arrogant attitude in the face of deposition, we wish to save the embarrassment of being shoved on our asses after a round of trash talking the rest of the world. Truthfully, however, the rest of the world saves earplugs for our more joyous occasions.
It’s not traitorous or unpatriotic to suggest that we should stop publicly claiming that we’re the best land in the world or, as some would suggest, blessed by god. The reality is that we can make these things clear by our continuing prosperity and a return to the values that led to our success, and not the values that come with success.
Hypocritically, we scoff at other states whose nationalistic pride seems to be the only thing they have going for them. The word freedom constantly lingers on our tongues as a comeback to questions of American integrity. Yet maintaining, furthering the freedom we treasure is a continuous, never-to-be-completed process, which in light of changing political momentum leads a new side of debate to believe that this may be the last Independence Day on which we are truly independent. Obama’s campaign rhetoric of transparency and a nearly complete failure to follow through on that essential promise is frustrating to his most ardent supporters.
For us to continue our independence, we must display and examine everything. Keeping under lock and key the pictures of our atrocities at Abu Ghraib serves as one of many obstacles to an essential understanding that this great nation has considerable room to improve when it comes to respecting both our own freedoms and those of others. If we continue to defend our human rights abuses, blatant disrespect for the ethnicity, nationality, or religion of our neighbors, censorship, and right of nations to sovereignty, we ourselves cannot truly be free.
We are not protecting our freedom by attending to foreign threats when a desperate and selfish desire for self-preservation as the supreme nation works to the contrary. The invisible hand should be augmented by a viable framework not only in our economy but in our politics. For every step forward we make in civil rights or liberation of information or ethics standards we inch forward to complacency and a freedom-cancelling paranoia based off of the disturbing conclusion that an America that is not superior in any aspect is not an America worth living in.
Our culture and attitude minus the in-your-face freedom-wagging shit-talking is what leads us to become a more perfect Union. Our reverence for hard work and willingness to adapt to new ideas becomes bogged down by our putting of finding new uses for the skills of our hardest workers who in turn refuse to leave behind irrelevant jobs.
We’re a nation where countless poor minorities are taught as children that they will never succeed through agonizing experience in a world decaying around them because of this same, self-perpetuating attitude. We argue against the “rationing” of rudimentary rights such as healthcare when in fact, healthcare, education, and even opportunity are rationed based on our wealth.
May our July fireworks set off fireworks inside the heads of our future great thinkers. I’m confident that we will meet these challenges as we have met every other.
