America Is Always Worth Celebrating

 Independence Day in these United States should be a stupendous and excessive explosion of red, white, and blue, with fireworks lighting the sky and masses of people celebrating America with the fervor to put a Roman bacchanal to shame.

This year’s Independence Day, our 250^th (apparently "semiquincentennial," "quarter-millennial," and even "bisesquicentennial" are all acceptable terms) —finds a more subdued mood as we approach this celebration.

The mood of the country is grim. Our politics are bitterly divided and many find it hard to separate the love of their country with the approval of their government. But don’t let the current state of affairs step on your celebration of America.

Hating the government does not diminish the spirit of America. Hating the government IS the spirit of America. Apple pie is as American as hating your government.

Rejecting the politicization of our Independence Day celebration is not a sign of America’s decline; it’s a sign that the rebellious patriotic spirit that created America still lives and endures. It is American as hell to detest pompous self-aggrandizement wrapped in the flag.

Theodore Roosevelt expressed this sentiment in 1918, “PATRIOTISM means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.”  He put this notion into even stronger terms later the same year, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” 

America has always been politically divided. Even during the American Revolution, which has been described as America’s first civil war, many Americans remained loyal to Britain – Benjamin Franklin’s own son William was the royal governor of New Jersey and fled the U.S. for England toward the end of the Revolution.

Today’s political divisions are vast and won’t be healed overnight, but our country has shown its resilience through much worse than our current state. We survived a real Civil War that killed more than half a million people. We survived rebellions, terror attacks, pandemics, natural disasters, and economic depressions.

No matter what your political leanings, you’re right to be dissatisfied with the state of our government and disgusted with the people ruling it (yes, both sides!). But the people in positions of power are not the nation itself. The low quality of our political leadership doesn’t make America less great, it reflects the growing disconnect between the people and those who govern them.

This Independence Day, fly your American flags proudly. We are descended from rogues and scoundrels who defeated an empire and built a nation that eventually forged an empire of its own.

A nation is not made great by the iconography of its most powerful, but the perseverance of its people.  America remains a land of promise and possibility. That is worth celebrating every day.