The Fourth of July, 2003

When a nearly 90 year old woman panics because her computer dies, I suppose it is funny. But I ain't laughin'.

My half-written 4th of July column is out in cyberspace someplace, possibly hovering over Siberia. Son Dave asked whether I had considered using a pen and paper, but that was going too far. So with my editor's consent, here is a slightly edited re-print of the 1998 column.

The 4th of July was a great holiday when I was a kid -- next to Christmas the best one.

My grandparents came from Illinois to visit each summer. It was my granddad who taught me how to spit watermelon seeds, but the high spot of each summer was the 4th of July. He would disappear for an hour or two and return with enough Roman candles and skyrockets for the two of us to endanger all the houses in that part of Englewood. I may not have been too much aware of what the day stood for, but I knew it was exciting.

Some years later I celebrated another Fourth by watching George M. Cohan in "I'd Rather Be Right." The audience stood and cheered with patriotic fervor when Cohan sang, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy/ A Yankee Doodle do or die/ A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam/ Born on the fourth of July." Our patriotism was probably encouraged by the fact that second gallery seats in the Auditorium Theater in Chicago in 1938 cost 55 cents.

Life was a lot simpler then. (There were no computers!) The symbols of the holiday -- the flag, the stirring music, the speeches which were so moving, assured us that our world was going to be here forever.

The war to end wars had been fought and won. It was the last of the "pure" wars. Justice had prevailed and we had made the world safe for democracy. There would be no more war in the world. Patriotism was clear in its meaning and not questioned. It meant that we were invincible, that we were always right.

But between my childhood and today, there has been a major world war in which more than 400,000 Americans of my generation died. There was a "police action" in Korea that killed over 50,000 and a war in Vietnam which killed 60,000 of our sons and daughters. And those are only the biggest wars.

And there was Hiroshima. The day the bomb fell, we entered a new world.

The concept of nationalism and patriotism changed, whether we chose to admit it or not, whether we liked it or not. The life of the planet is now at risk. My granddad's skyrockets and today's glamorous displays do not mean the same thing. Old style "patriotism" has become our security blanket in a world too frightening to face.

Tonight there will be fireworks displays all over the country and they will be beautiful to see. There will be parades, and the bystanders who consider themselves patriotic will sit peacefully in their deck chairs as the flags go by. The few who salute will be stared at. Probably not many of us will give much thought to what the day stands for.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," we were a country of barely 2 million people, mostly western European stock.

Today we are a huge, highly diverse country on a planet that is tied together with communication Jefferson could not have imagined. We love it and we know it is good, but we haven't figured out exactly how to handle it or how to keep it.

G. K Chesterton spoke to the problem. "'My country, right or wrong ' is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"