July 4th is going to be different this year. COVID-19 has canceled the city’s community wide celebration in Pioneer Park and its Main Street parade – real life versions of a Norman Rockwell painting in this picturesque small city. The park would have been filled with bands, dance groups representing anglo and hispanic heritage, scores of food and craft vendors circling the bandstand, displays for every political party, interest group and government agency. The Main Street parade would have been everything expected of a small city parade. Neighborhood parades would have featured trikes and bikes decorated in red, white and blue. Dusk would have brought the fireworks, official and unofficial, legal and illegal. We’ll still have the fireworks, at least the illegal ones.
July 4th has celebrated the best of America’s past, both the real and the mythological. It’s been joyfully patriotic, proud of America’s history of equality for all, and the unalienable right to pursue life, liberty and happiness. It’s also been blithely unaware of realities that have prevented the full measure of rights and equality from being shared by all.
George Floyd’s murder changed all that. I don’t know why it was the catalyst when so many others had preceded it without the same effect. It may be due to nearly real time sharing of videos recording the entire incident. Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds is a long time to watch the life being squeezed out of a person by an officer sworn to protect and serve. Perhaps even that wouldn’t have been enough but for four years of Trump’s record of inciting racial violence, criminal acts, lying, ignorance, incompetency, and aggrandizement of executive authority approaching autocracy. He gave urgency to public remembrance of cruel injustices that have accompanied the American dream throughout its history; memories conveniently overlooked when it’s summer time and the living is easy.
This July 4th, the paper will feature the usual reprints of the Declaration of Independence. There will be some talk of the Constitution, explaining once more to an ill informed public that the two are not the same. A few writers will throw in references to speeches by Washington, Lincoln and Eisenhower. But this July 4th will also feature a stronger voice for black lives, demands that the story of America’s slave economy be made an important part of our history, recognition of women’s rights, awareness of genocidal suppression of Indigenous peoples, and more. They are not voices and stories well received by those who believe they betray the mythology of America’s melting pot exceptionalism. They inspire anxiety that something of importance is being taken away. What and from whom?
What is threatened to be taken away is comfortable satisfaction that the United States lives up to and into the fullness of equal rights and equal opportunity for all. To take that comfortable satisfaction away is somehow seen as disrespectful of sacrifices made to protect rights and opportunities. There is a sense that it takes away from those who have enjoyed the fullness of them, giving it to those who haven’t worked for it. It’s not the dreaded redistribution of wealth, but the more dreaded fear that redistribution of rights and privileges for some to get more, means others must get less. In a more subtle way, there’s a realization that it means surrendering power and status, something few of us want to do.
Is all of this a racial thing? Perhaps not exclusively, but for the most part yes it is, and it demands of white Americans that they recognize it as part of what is called systemic racism. It’s humiliating to admit that so much of what one has celebrated as true about America has been mythologized, and that reality paints a much different picture. No one likes being humiliated; no one likes being accused of misdeeds committed by previous generations; no one likes discovering they’ve believed in too many fairy tales. It’s understandable that there’s resistance.
The American ideals celebrated on July 4th are not less worthy for it. They remain ideals to guide us, and to be lived into. An American story more solidly grounded in reality provides a place from which real progress can be made. It’s a good thing. It makes room for resolution of caustic divisiveness, and creates opportunities for new ways that remove long lived barriers to equality for all to enjoy the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as each is able.
Cherished American ideals celebrated on the July 4th are worthy of remembrance. They deserve celebration with renewed commitment to live into them. In the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for ‘him’ who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”