Why do I celebrate the 4th of July?
Hello again,
(I wrote a spur of the moment twitter thread on the importance of the 4th of July and thought I’d share it below: https://twitter.com/Hebro_Steele/status/1676236907397939201?s=20)
Why do I celebrate the 4th of July?
Yes, America is the nation that enslaved and segregated my people for centuries — I am the first male in my family to be born free of those historical oppressions.
America is also the nation that admitted in the 1960s to its great racial evils. Since then, it has tried to right those wrongs, however flawed those efforts may have been.
My black grandfather, born to enslaved grandparents, marched for equal rights because he believed in the American principles despite being denied them.
Born in 1900, he was only able to enjoy those principles fully for the last ten years of his life.
On the other side of my family, America sacrificed many of her young men and women to free Europe from Nazi Germany.
My Jewish grandfather living in a displacement camp after surviving the Holocaust crossed out “Palestine” on his destination papers. He wrote in “USA.”
He wanted the American freedom to test himself against the world, something he could not do in antisemitic Poland.
In America, both grandfathers achieved great successes despite both of them only having a third grade education.
Their children, my parents, fell in love at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in many states. And my parents married despite prejudices from their own family members.
Over time, even those family members came to realize that their prejudices were not worth the cost of losing family. America allowed them that path of forgiveness and redemption.
I grew up knowing both the good and evil of America. The good of America was its universal principles of liberty, equality, individualism, and on. The evil of America was its citizens that failed to live up to those principles.
Principles are principles. They are our guiding light. The fact that many Americans betrayed those principles is a failure of the people and not the principles.
America is only as good as its people. The road ahead is a long one, but many good people are striving to make this imperfect nation of ours a better one.
That is why I celebrate the 4th of July— as kind of an independence from the sins of the past and as well as a hope that we can better this imperfect nation of ours for all.
Happy 4th of July!!
Eli
My parents left Czechoslovakia going to Ecuador in 1938, leaving the Nazis. In 1947, after the end of the War and after my sister and I were born, we went back to CZE. A short stay because the Russians invaded in 1948 and my parents wisely packed us up with one suitcase for the whole family and went to Canada. In 1951 we came NYC. July Fourth and Thanksgiving are my two favorite holidays; there is no place I would rather live...warts and all.
Yes, excellent. When I talk to some, especially on the left, they’re reasoning is the essentially nihilistic view that the evils discredit the principles completely. With that, they are left with nothing. Throw out the Constitution. They are unmoored from anything foundational or true.