It's also very suburban quasi-woke to me. If you're in a big city, you'll see tons of different groups of folks celebrating the Fourth and realize that this holiday means too many things to too many people to just be dismissed because "America bad."
I loved going to Prospect Park in Brooklyn as a kid and seeing Hasidic families eat kosher hot dogs right next to halal barbeque pits. I loved hearing people speaking Yiddish, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and English in one space, all celebrating side by side.
Every year, the Fourth has meant everything from celebrating that my family was granted refuge in early 1900's Brooklyn to my cousin recently being granted US citizenship.
Like, if people who think they're being righteous had any recent immigrant friends or family at all, they would know that people who just came here really don't want to hear griping about a perfectly good holiday.
& Even when I lived in Japan, it was so much fun to gather my two (2) American friends and go to the one (1) place in my town that sold American-style beef hot dogs (it was literally a vendor in an old samurai house) and then set off sparklers by the riverside.
And when I was a very earnest kid and cared a lot about history, I would personally read stuff like Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" and Born on the Fourth of July during the day, then go set off fireworks and eat watermelon at night. My mom spent yesterday morning watching a bummer documentary about Project 2025 and urging all her boomer friends to vote, and then she chowed down on a burger. You can/should do both!!
P.S. The fake idea that Americans don't have culture? This is our culture!!
P.P.S. It makes me think about how Muslims fasting during Ramadan is a communal event; it's considered better to break the fast with company than alone (ditto for fasting in Judaism). For a month each year, almost 2 billion people around the world are united by that fasting.
By contrast, Lent for Catholics, at least in the US, is much more of an individualistic self-improvement project.
There's not a lot of value placed on community in general in the West.
So for folks who complain about fireworks: I get it, but it's also important to acknowledge that there is something cool and lovely about being able to *hear* (and see), for just a handful of hours each year, that we're all doing the same thing at the same time all across the country. That we a hundreds of millions but we are also a shared society.
2087
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