Gratitude Monday: The air of independence

In this exceptionally ugly and moronic presidential election year, I feel like a fish out of water. Not in the sense of a cute plot device for a movie starring Tom Hanks, but in the sense that I am up to my gills in the toxic output of candidates and their followers all up and down the food chain, and I’m gasping for some air that’s actually capable of getting oxygen to my blood. So let’s focus on something good about America.

Know what I love about Independence Day?

Well, naturally I love revisiting the Declaration of Independence, that exquisitely beautiful document that sets out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

And I love the notion of the Founding Fathers weighing all their options and agreeing that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Well, damn—can’t see that happening in any political body around the world today. Can you? Certainly the onliest pledges our pols care about are the campaign contribution variety. And they no more possess honor of any stripe than they possess the ability to squirt cider out of their ears.

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally imagine is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, a lot of stuff has been happening in the past decade, in all three of the branches of government. And the evil that men do does indeed live after their terms in office or on the bench. But I have to believe that this is more of a cha-cha than a straightforward and inexorable march in any direction. Those Founding Fathers, man—they had soul.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals or the corporations; those were the days, huh?) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can.

And I’m grateful that we’ve made it this far, despite all the missteps along the way.