July 4th Fireworks

Freedom’s Fantasy vs Reality

Few family events are so Americana as watching community sponsored fireworks shows the night of July 4th. All enjoy the vividly colored explosions of the sky, the distant booms, lingering foggy smoke, and often the accompanying theme music played, in our case, on a local FM radio station. A lively capstone on our earlier dinner time family discussion of what July 4th meant historically. Of course our more exacting members had to remind us that the document was actually signed on July 2nd. But we read it out loud anyway. Two of our three grandchildren are too young to understand the gravity of the ideas carried in the Declaration of Independence; one at age 13 is beginning to understand that all we take for granted for the past two plus centuries was once nebulous. But we must also understand that the freedoms demanded in that Declaration and encoded in the later Constitution may be becoming fantasies, no more representing the realities of our nation’s unique history and status t…