Happy Fourth!

I love the 4th of July. It's my kind of holiday - a day off with food and beer and friends with no formality required. It has no religious foundation, so I can participate hypocrisy free, and I don't have to figure out presents or panic about cards or cookies or any expectations at all, really. Plus, the twins' birthday is July 5th, so the 4th is like a warmup.

I do like being American. It's almost embarassing to admit that - there's so much bad to take with the good, and the country seems so much like a well-intentioned but kind of dim fat old woman with extravagant spending habits and 32 spoiled cats. I hate that we push our collective craziness onto the rest of the world so unequally - our pollution, our bizarre holy wars, our insatiable oil hunger. I hate our complacency and stubbornness, our resolute unilinguilism, our residual racism, our wastefulness and selfishness and palpable sense of superiority.

But we're kind of kids, still, aren't we? At only 231 years old, we're really just starting out, and if we've outgrown our maturity on a rich diet of natural resources and economic luck, we're not all bad. There's definitely something to the whole freedom of speech and freedom of religion idea, however imperfectly implemented, and we do struggle closer and closer, on balance, toward some kind of equality. We make efforts at sharing, with each other and with other countries, although our spending priorities seem a bit out of whack.

I can't help feeling hopeful that we can hold this house of cards together long enough to outgrow some of this teenage angst and form a truly more perfect union. Maybe we will start looking at the almost-everything that unites us and stop hunting down opportunities for division.

To sum up - you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. See? Who needs to write, when you can quote dead people!

So, here's to America, to eating hot dogs and drinking beer and watching 1776 on TBS. Happy 4th, everyone!