Independence Day
Scenes from Quarantine — Day 111
The Fourth of July was always the boy’s favorite holiday. When he was small, he would ride his bike in the neighborhood parade, bounce for hours in the bouncy house, sit behind the wheel of the giant firetrucks, and get deliciously sticky with cotton candy lint and sno cone drips. The last handful of years we have been unavoidably out of the country for Independence Day and each time we made our plans, he had said, “But NEXT year, we can be at home, right?”
We’d already agreed that there was little to celebrate about this country this year, so the cancellation of the city fireworks, the neighborhood parade, and both block parties passed with little remark. America does not seem particularly free or brave right now, as so many publicly and messily mistake an individual freedom to do whatever you wish, ideally without consequence, with the weightier and more challenging notion that a people should have true liberty — the freedom to join together to build better lives and a better society governed of the people, by the people, and for the people. As we watched the descent of those in power into greed, selfishness, and and the elevation of the wants of the one over the needs of the many, we faced the grim realization that our mostly cherished, American truth was far from self-evident. All men (and women) may have been created equal but within our first gasping breaths we were already sorted into privilege and poverty, white and brown, powerful and powerless, and that fundamental inequality dogs us throughout tortured lifetimes.
And so it was hard to want to put up flags and pennants, sing hymns to our homeland, and celebrate beneath the disquieting realization that perhaps the Great American Experiment had failed. We had no bells to ring, fifes to blow, drums to bang, nor fireworks to light the sky. We resigned to a day of quiet contemplation and reflection, to consider where we, as America, had gone so very wrong and whether we, as a family, had any ability to clean up the giant mess that two hundred and forty four years of America had made.
Our friends had continued their string quartet concerts each Saturday and to mark the occasion of Independence Day, today they added to their usual Romantic chamber repertoire some American folk tunes and Sousa music. “Be kind to your web-footed friends…” On the walk to their driveway and back we saw a few neighbors who had put up red, white, and blue decorations, and many more neighbors standing on their lawns to marvel at the neighborhood peahen casually strolling between small flags into the grass to peck at whatever a peahen finds interesting. “…a duck maybe somebody’s brother…”
Back home we set to the only thing we really had planned and the one thing we had been waiting for many years to do. With the stage show of Hamilton filmed in its entirety and released to watch at home, we could finally watch two beloved musicals that strip America back to its first principles, 1776 and Hamilton, back to back. For five solid hours, we watched intelligent, well-intentioned men and women come together to wrestle with the painful task of not only taking their freedom but of extending it to all within their neighborhoods, communities, cities, and states. What they sought was right but they were as flawed as any of us and understood as well as we do now that the nation they built and the framework it stood on was far from perfect and that there were lifetimes of work still to be done in the pursuit of the ideals they reached for. John Adams raged against the preservation of institutions that guaranteed centuries of liberty and justice for some, not all. Aaron Burr stepped back, “…taking my time watching the afterbirth of a nation…”. Nobody got it right, but they tried.
As Adams railed and Dickinson retorted, I saw a flash of green outside the window. Down the street, friends were setting off sparklers, so we sat on our doorstep to watch. That did not last long as the girls from down the street came running over to offer sparklers to my own children and before we knew it, we were all down on pavement, watching sparks fly and tendrils of light bloom and push against the darkness. The cacophony of incessant fireworks had begun an hour before the sun dropped below the horizon and echoed all around us, a flutter, chaotic, deep heartbeat pulsing below every conscious thought. The boy came outside to report that some of what we could hear could be seen along the creek behind our house, so we opened up our gates and welcomed friends and strangers up the embankment behind our house to see what there was to see.
Years ago, the city fireworks show had been from the high school football field, which is on the opposite side of the creek from us, and so our block party had always culminated with inviting everyone through our yard to set up chairs on the embankment and watch the fireworks bloom overhead, to stirring music. We had not expected there to be anything extraordinary tonight, so were not only astonished at the bright display but also at how quickly old friends gathered to greet warmly and share their experiences of months of isolation beneath the spectacular glow and their memories of friendship in the beforetimes.
With no structure or leadership, the fireworks displays were an adventure, bursts here, there, large, small, completely unpredictable. It was more like watching a meteor shower than any fireworks I had ever watched before. Stare at the sky, watch everywhere, don’t blink. Middle child spoke about the fear she felt when she was small, vividly remembered, and just as vividly recounted how she taught herself to move past the fear to delight. She was only one who observed, as the sky illuminated and darkened again and again, that this tradition was ironically the hardest on those who had experienced the horrors of war and for whom the bloom of flame brought memories of death and destruction, not celebration.
Oh, America! You are, if anything, a land of contradictions. You torture those who fight for your freedom, crush those who strive for your promised dream, and still, when you strip everything away from us, our prosperity, our justice, our equality, our health, our very lives, even then, when all of it seems gone and our future seems bleak, we cannot be stopped from coming together to celebrate you defiantly, noisily, jubilantly. We have to keep believing that what you promised us is real, and that it is worth fighting for. We have to understand that all of us have the inalienable (unalienable) rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it is that truth that we celebrate on a dark night in early July and that we will keep fighting for all of the other days of the year. No matter how late the hour has grown, how dark the world around us is, nor how harshly those who stand within your hallowed halls try to keep us on our knees, we’ll rise up.
July 4, 2020. Happy Independence Day!
