Have a Radical Fourth

The Fourth of July has always been my favorite holiday. It’s a holiday without pretense, heavy emotional weight, or serious custom. It’s kind of how a holiday should be – fun, relaxing, a chance to spend time with friends and family in the sun.

Though it’s often overdone by jingoists and blowhards who substitute wearing the American flag for having a personality, it’s a holiday that I also connect with on a personal level. I think you should, too. The American experiment began in earnest 247 years ago and it can be easy to forget how radical the Declaration of Independence was and how essential its best ideals are to our future.

On the one side, you have people who deify the founders and inscribed upon history the prejudices of the present. One only needs to hear the oft-repeated falsity about the country being founded as a “Christian nation” or to observe the freakout that the reading of the actual text of the Declaration is seen as anti-American.

On the other side, you have folks who see how flawed the founders were as individuals, how defective parts of the Declaration and the Constitution were, and how short of the ideal we still remain. I can appreciate that and recognize that maybe it hits a bit differently for me based upon my perspective.

But I also know that the American experiment is very human by design and, as human systems typically are messy, America’s story will be, too.

I know that that before the Declaration invoked the laws of nature to proclaim everyone equally created with inalienable human rights, it didn’t exist at scale anywhere else on the planet. To pledge one’s life and fortune to overturning the divine right of monarchy in the name of the common person was truly radical. It changed the world.

I know that it was a movement founded on indigenous thought and led by intellectuals, entrepreneurs, writers, and financiers – not the people one would expect to overthrow the establishment in favor of empowering the individual. It was a movement that started as conversations and moved to action before gaining widespread acceptance. Even during the revolution, 20% of the population was estimated to remain loyal to the English king, and the greatest number of people were uncommitted fence sitters. Passion, clarity of purpose, and commitment to one another won the argument and won the day.

I know that the grand Declaration and the Revolutionary War were only the start. To arrive at our present station, this nation had to weather the changes from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the drafting of the Constitution, a second war with Britain for survival, a series of moral failings leading to the Civil War, Reconstruction, westward expansion, mass immigration, women’s suffrage, the Great Depression, the dust bowl, two world wars, the civil rights movement, the Apollo program, Vietnam, the Cold War, 9/11, and Facebook . That’s a lot of change. Though not without setbacks, including in the present, the macrotrend is about the expansion of rights and empowerment of individuals.

I know that the only way that this all happened was through continued work and waves of movement building across the span of centuries.

There are a few lessons here for us when it comes to climate change:

• Our movement is focused on changing how we live today so we may all take part in the future.
• It’s a movement underpinned by indigenous thought and led by intellectuals, writers, financiers, and entrepreneurs.
• It seemed radical at first but will seem obvious in retrospect.
• It has a passionate and growing core of devotees and can only be won by both empowering the masses and by convincing the fence sitters.
• That every step isn’t the destination, but a continuing journey towards the ideal that requires both urgency and long persistence.
• And because it is a human system, it will require human solutions that are going to be messy, imperfect, and perpetually fought for.

I think we need to be radically committed to achieving the best reading of the ideals of the American system. I think anything less will be a disservice to the struggles of the past and the needed achievement of our future, both on climate and in the forming of a more perfect union.

Anyway, I hope you have a Happy Fourth of July! Having lived overseas twice and traveled to six continents and 40+ countries, I have seen and appreciate how much we can learn from others. But I continue to choose the US. I’m grateful for how it has shaped me and the opportunities it has provided. To quote Weezer 's Rivers Cuomo, “I love the USA. Fuck yeah, this place is great.”

If you enjoyed this, I would greatly appreciate you sharing it with your networks! Below the "Published By" section below, you'll find tools to do like / comment / share. Please do so!