Holding Fourth
Holding Fourth
Independence Day reminds us to think about what we are waiting for
For all the celebrations and public fireworks, the Fourth of July is a rather serious holiday. It can be a time to reflect on the ideals that shaped this nation from its birth and how we struggle to live up to them.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack “Letters from an American”, in a post dated July 3, 2022, writes that the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress, were largely centered on their own narrow interests when they declared that “all men were created equal” as “self-evident.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document.
It was an ideal that transcended their own time, an expression beyond what is that speaks to what is possible. Cox adds:
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
She cited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The United States has endured ..
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his 1958 poem, “I am Waiting” gets at something of the seriousness of the American project, and that we are holding on, waiting for these ideals to be realized. Here is an excerpt:
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right…
On this Fourth of July, I’d like to thank you, our subscribers — all 177 of you, 37 of whom are paid. This local online “newspaper” is an experiment in what’s possible, in the hope that we engage more fully in civic life. What we share in common as Americans is a belief that all of us can all do better.