Independence Day
By Alan King
The Fourth of July is not one of those holidays that can be moved to a Monday so that you can always have a three day weekend. They did it in Canada. They have a national holiday with fireworks and everything that is called Canada Day. It celebrates the union of all the parts of Canada into one nation in 1867. It's really on the 1st of July but they observe it on a Monday. If our forefathers and foremothers had called it Independence Day, then it wouldn't seem so silly if you had to ask "Hey, when's the Fourth of July this year?" Duh!
Anyway our long weekend was messed up this year by that pesky Monday when you had to work or else take a vacation day. This year the weather has been so nearly perfect in June that the Fourth of July sort of sneaked up on me. I've been watching the corn in the fields this spring just jump out of the ground every time we got some rain. They always used to say if the corn was "knee high by the Fourth of July" then we were going to have a good harvest. Last year we scarcely had any knee high corn what with all the early wet weather and then the hot, dry June. This year has been perfect. It'll be one of those years that people will look back on and say, "Corn was 5 feet tall by the Fourth of July back in 2000." And if the farmers do well, everyone else here in farm country does better, too.
Which brings me to another point. Our nation as a whole is doing better this Fourth of July in many ways than at any other time in our history. We have enough jobs for virtually anyone who wants one. Life expectancy and quality of life are improving all the time. Life in these United States is pretty good.
I just finished reading the whole Declaration of Independence for the first time. Everyone has read or heard the part about "all men are created equal" and "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." I wasn't aware that most of the rest of it was a list of complaints against King George. He wouldn't let us pass our own laws, he restricted immigration, he abused his control of the Courts, and: "he has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance." Sounds to me like government bureaucrats and red tape weren't any more popular then than they are now.
The list goes on: He plundered the coasts, deprived people of fair trials, restricted trade, and sent mercenary soldiers to subdue us. And one item of local interest: he "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." King George was quite a nasty fellow.
So I guess the colonists were just pushed too far by their government and they pushed back. I've seen the same type of thing happen in recent history. During the time when I was in high school and college from about 1962 to 69, the Vietnam war was heating up. It was the one constant worry in nearly all of our lives. We hoped the war would be over by the time we got out of High School. And then we hoped that it would be over before we got out of College. We hoped that our draft deferment for a bum knee or punctured eardrum would last for just another few months and maybe the war would be over. It just never was.
We watched the war on TV every night and it always seemed that we were winning. It was given to us like a basketball score: "120 Viet Cong dead and only 23 US casualties today." But that war just kept going on and on. At first we would only be there for a few months or a year. We were just advisors. But before long, there were a half million GI's in Vietnam and tens of thousands had died.
And the body bags that we saw being loaded onto planes held our classmates, the kid down the block, and a large proportion of poor kids that couldn't afford to get a college deferment. Eventually my generation, the so called "Baby Boomers," began to feel that our government did not represent us. Pretty soon the growing fringe of war protesters began to feel that they were really representing the majority opinion.
We saw what the colonists saw: That "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government." Most of us never went to Washington to march, or fled to Canada, or bombed draft boards. What we did do was grow our hair long, avoid working for "the man," flashed two finger peace signs to each other and just quietly tried to be as uncooperative to our government as was possible without getting arrested. We went when we were drafted and spent our military time just trying not to be killed. Plus we voted. And we got the laws changed so that 18 year olds could vote, too. After all, the argument went, if you were old enough to die for your country, you ought to be able to vote. We were pushed too far, and we finally pushed back.
Now my generation is in Washington and Columbus and down at the Courthouse. There have been a couple of pendulum swings from liberal to conservative and back and forth again since the 70’s. We are engaged in a conflict overseas that is looking more and more like the quagmire of Vietnam. Once again detractors of the war are considered unpatriotic or cowardly. What has also changed is that now we are "The Man" and we need to remember our outrage when a questionable war was forced on us then. If we learned nothing else from the Vietnam experience it is this: discussion and a variety of opinions are always better that insulation and group-think. Lets be civil with each other and honor our hard earned right to express a different opinion. Our independence is always a work in progress. Let’s keep working on it together.
© 2006 Alan D. King