Mastery Year 2: Part 4: Post 3: 4th of July

This post is for the 4^th of July. Odd circumstances prevented my posting it as scheduled.-D.

Today, Greg read the Declaration of Independence aloud. No big surprise there, he usually does a historical talk on the Fourth. Then he asked whether we believed the birthday of the country deserves to be celebrated. Instant intellectual pandemonium.

It’s not that everyone began talking at once, they didn’t, it’s that the answers came quickly, were many, varied, and in most cases assumed to be self-evident by their advocates.

“Of course it does, this is the greatest country on Earth.”

“Of course it doesn’t, the whole thing was a lie from the get-go. Thomas Jefferson owned people.”

“Adams and Franklin didn’t. They wrote the Declaration, too.”

“Whatever. Slavery was legal. Women couldn’t vote.”

“But signing the Declaration created the harmonic potential that manifested in universal adult franchise.”

“That doesn’t begin to pay off the karmic debt of owning people.”

“Or annihilating Native American groups.”

“Native Americans are still here.”

“Not all of them.”

“Or re-enslaving black people through the prison system.”

“Or discriminating against women or LGBT people.”

“Nobody has ever been denied the right to vote for being gay.”

“You can’t vote if you can’t live.”

“That’s a different issue.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Right or wrong, the founding of our country was still a Big Deal. It deserves to be observed.”

“Yeah, but as what, though? The country we pretend to be, or the one we actually are?”

“The country we pretend to be is also the country we are. Both are true.”

“That’s completely illogical.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“When it was founded, this country was the free-est in the world. You have to look at it in historical context.”

“No, it wasn’t. The Iroquois Confederacy was.”

“It’s still the free-est country in the world. We have our faults, but so does everybody else.”

“Some countries have fewer faults than we do.”

“Have you ever lived in any of these supposedly free-er countries? They’re socialist.”

“Have you ever lived in them?”

“Wasn’t the United States founded mostly by Freemasons? How many other countries can say that? George Washington himself was a weather witch.”

“He was not.”

“He had to have been.”

“He owned slaves, too.”

While all of these ideas were flurrying about, Greg stood still and upright, his hands behind his back, his iron-grey hair clumped to his scalp by sweat because he still wore his long-sleeved full uniform while standing in the sun. Steve sat off to the side, equally attentive, looking less like a recalcitrant student and more like the teacher he can be.

When the flurry simmered down, Greg looked at Steve, and Steve spoke up.

“The tradition of patriotic, principled resistance that the Founders enshrined is what we still use to fight against the wrongs they took for granted,” he said.

My nephew, Paul, who had wandered over from one of the camp activities to stand by me, tugged on my shirt.

“Why do we have fireworks in July?” he asked. “The days are so long, it takes forever to get dark.”

“Sometimes they have fireworks in December, too,” I reminded him. “For New Year’s Eve.”

“That is a much better idea,” he said.