Independence!

May we each find it in our own way; and may we collectively declare ourselves free of the ignorance, bigotry, and cruelty that have betrayed this nation's noblest ideals.

Time again to celebrate independence, on a holiday I long ago reconstructed in my own imagination as a personal and not a national(istic) occasion. A day to gather with family and friends and enjoy simple things, and (of course) appreciate the freedom to do so. Freeing the mind from conformism, ideology, and pointless regret is always worth a day’s reflection. Cheering a military (or a Macy’s) parade and bombs bursting in air with false pseudo-patriotic bravado, though, is not for me. John Fogerty said it best in Fortunate Son. “It ain’t me…”

But this is, happily, the day when I always pull Richard Ford’s Independence Day from the shelf and look for passages that speak to my sense of the real meaning of independence. And then maybe pull down Emerson too. “The impulse to read Self-Reliance is significant here, as is the holiday itself—my favorite secular one for being public and for its implicit goal of leaving us only as it found us: free.”

Well, that’s not quite where the day finds us this year. We celebrate not the achievement of full freedom and justice for all in our country, yet, but its prospect and possibility. As Wendell Berry told Bill Moyers, the question always is not whether we will succeed, but whether we’ll do the right thing. When we do, we’ll deserve it.