Monday Smiles – 7/4/2011

My son loves historical documentaries and a subscription to Netflix gives him ample opportunity to watch them.  He often regales us with tales of the flaws in everyman’s knowledge of American history, how what the schools taught is often mythology not fact.  I listen  but rarely have much to say which I know frustrates him.  I’m much more aware of the fallacies of popular American mythology than he thinks I am but history has never been my favorite subject.  Besides, at sixty-seven, I’m interested in the broad strokes of most subjects, not the details.  The broadest stroke of American history is that the U.S has been a uniquely positive influence in a world too often influenced by tyrants, whether they be monarchs, imams, or chancellors, regardless of the warts and little secrets my son finds in his documentaries.

So, it’s Independence Day, and if I spend some time searching for Fourth of July myths, I’ll find that the Continental Congress actually declared independence  from Great Britain on July 2 and that the gathering of the delegates in Philadelphia on July 4th to sign the Declaration never happened.  The document was signed with little fanfare on August 2 by most delegates, and some signed much later.  The Liberty Bell never rang in the singing of the Declaration and not only did Betsy Ross not sew the first flag, she may not have lived in The Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia.  Though we don’t know who sewed the first flag we do know that it was designed by Frances Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration.   Many people think that  John Trumbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence, which hangs in the Capitol Rotunda portrays the signing of the Declaration on July Fourth.  It doesn’t.   It portrays the presentation of the draft of the Declaration to Congress on June 28, 1776.  So, we’re celebrating on the wrong day and many of the tales we tell are myths.  One of our best loved pieces of national art doesn’t portray what we think it does.  But in the broad strokes, it doesn’t matter because the real art of Independence Day is this:

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 governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Simply stunning.  It’s Monday, July 4, Independence Day.  I’m smiling.

HAPPY
INDEPENDENCE
DAY

Animated flag image by 3DFlags.com

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Tags: gratitude, holidays, Independence Day, patriotism, perspectives, postaday2011

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