Monday is Independence Day, a holiday which symbolizes everything good about the United States of America.
Our Founding Fathers, who are often quoted both in and out of context, believed in an ideal. They broke away from England just shy of 250 years ago and built a country that was based on freedom. That meant freedom from tyranny, freedom from a tyrannical rule and freedom to find their own destiny as a nation.
Freedoms started mostly for smaller groups of us in the beginning, and then those freedoms became available over the decades and centuries for everyone. We have seen times where we were unified together under the flag we all take so much pride in. And we have seen times where we were pitted against one another.
Never in our history -– save for perhaps during the Civil War – has this been more the case than now.
Things are not good in America these days. It is at times like the Fourth of July, Sept. 11, Veterans Day and others where we take a breath for just a few minutes to celebrate why we are the same. We are Americans, and this country has endured quite a bit to creep up on its sestercentennial year as a free society.
But those moments on these historic and significant holidays are mere gasps of air while floating in a vast ocean of mistrust, hate and rancor.
And we have to do better.
It starts not just at the ballot box or in government, but within our own relationships. Divisive politics are turning friends against one another and ending long-standing friendships, both business and personal.
We have let it get this bad. We have let ourselves become wrapped up in the concept that our enemies sit next door to us, and a functioning America cannot survive another 250 years this way.
We have to commit to resolve these differences between us. We have to find common middle ground in our governance and in our personal discourse.
This is not the America that our Founding Fathers framed for us with a Constitution that we all believe firmly in. That document was written with the idea that common men would gather to discuss the way forward and come to rational decisions built on compromise and hope.
Ben Franklin once said, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Old Ben is right. We have to find ways to hang together. Blue and red, black and white … red, white and blue.
Happy Fourth of July!