Soldier with tattered battle flag of 8th Pennsylvania, 1864
There is, we are always told, more to Independence Day than fireworks, feasting and firearms (admittedly, I enjoy all three). There is History. True. There is pride in how far our country has come, and the sacrifices made along the way since 1776. Yes, that's there. We are a nation of laws, we are told. Sometimes, and not always good ones.
There is also the inescapable fact that our nation was founded upon an act of lawbreaking rebellion. Think about that for a moment. We would not be marking this day at all had not partisan mobs, bands of guerillas and, finally, some agitated politicians joined together to break — violently — the loyalties that had been drilled into their society for over a century.
That tradition continued, too. Americans broke laws to come to this country, broke laws to settle it, broke laws to free slaves, broke laws to form unions and broke laws to demand equal rights. We are a nation of lawbreakers. There is nothing more American, at our best and worst, than rebellion.
This is because we are also a nation of outcasts. Everyone here is descended from people kicked out of somewhere else, and the natives they pushed out on their way down. This explains much of our national character; along with dissidents, dreamers, entrepreneurs and the persecuted we got criminals, con artists, cutthroats, zealots and the insane. Each are as American as the other, but the arguments over who represents the country's true spirit began shortly after its founding and have never ceased since.
Something is lost every time we sanitize something so full of blood and contradiction. Something vital removed every time the founders become plaster saints instead of human leaders. We lose sight of the true miracle: that collection of peoples so brutally, vibrantly fractious became a single nation at all, let alone anything resembling a great one.
Better to let the whole story stand as a reminder that independence is an ongoing struggle, not something achieved long ago, and that it becomes a dead thing the day we stop fighting to defend the rights won, and expand them.
Today, that is what we celebrate.
E Pluribus Unum
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