The Unique Fourth

Today is July 4. It is not 1776, nor any other Fourth since. As Charles Pierce wrote at Esquire Politics yesterday “This is a great year to have a Fourth of July because we are in the middle of another one of those historical moments in which the great bluff gets called, loudly, raucously, and in the public square. You remember that great bluff.”

It is the ‘great bluff’ as Pierce writes, that Fredrick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. called, along with others, like Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Harvey Milk, FDR, JFK, Malcolm X, RFK attempted as well.

Today is our nation’s 244th ‘birthday.’ Yet, today is different. There will be no parades, fireworks or ball games. We are in the mist of a pandemic not seen in a century and nothing even remotely resembles a normal Independence Day.

We come to this day as divided as we’ve ever been. A day where the “United States” seems like a perverse joke rather than a declaration that Jefferson wrote almost two-and-a-half centuries ago.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the…