Independence Day
Today is Independence Day or July 4, the day many of us take off to celebrate the day we declared our independence from the British. Most of us know the significance of this day that forever changed our history, but we also at the same time forget how much we have changed since those revolutionary times.
Back in 1776 and for nearly a century there-after we were largely an agrarian and rural society. Most people farmed, their livelihoods were connected to the land. Few people traveled long distances, and most would die only a few miles from where they were born. The connections to community and the land that supported us was strong.
While Americans had some of the resources of industrialising Britain, we were largely dependent on our ourselves. We made most of what we needed, our foot print on the modern world was small. People could act even in foolish ways and have a minimal impact on the world. Today technology with all it’s destructive power simply did not exist.
We certainly have farmland and rural areas today. Yet, we now hop in our pickup truck and our able to be transmitted to an urbanised area in minutes. Few people are very free at all to chose their own lives. We are always connected using information technology from the simple telephone to the sophisticated Internet. Yet that’s not community in the old sense.
Even the meaning of declaring war is different today. We could not go to war the way once were able to. Primitive firearms and cannons, while increasingly loud and dangerous in 1776 posed minimal risk to human kind compared to war today. The emotions of yesteryear and the fear of war today is changed by it being almost instantaneous and destructive to all in it’s path.
We will never be able to go back to those times. We have to live in the world of today, and realize that while we are blessed by all this technology it poses problems that simply did not exist years ago. We may celebrate what our founding fathers once did, but we must also be aware that we can never return back to their old world.
1 Comment
True. There was also room to be free from the government; to ignore the government except for when they came for your land.
Now, being “into” being American has a whole other set of meanings. It means fantastic rights, privileges and protections for some and there is a lot of gratitude for that. It also means total invasion of privacy for all; it means policies of invading other self-determined societies and interfering in every way with them, without their consent. The flag has a lot of meanings.
I appreciate my first amendment protections, another meaning that this flag, this American identity, has. I also appreciate a revolt against colonial rule while understanding that these colonies were an assault on another set of nations.
American independence also means a freedom from traditional expectations of behavior, unleashing the most violent society — in domestic behavior as well as behavior abroad — ever seen…. in scope. America has come to also represent a prison industrial complex which confines a larger percentage of our population than any other nation, even the most despotic. The meaning of America, dubious from the start, is pretty dubious at present. I know you and I work to create an America that redresses some of the worse of our legacy, our environmental cost to the planet.