Introduction
I write on July 3rd. In a few hours, the day of our 250th anniversary will begin.
I have readers from all over the world. Some of you may think that my last entry, posted this morning at the tick of midnight, was a little negative. You may have a point. I wrote more obviously about what America is not rather than what it is. But I was trying to make a point, which is that we in America feel that many other nations--including nations that Americans died to help liberate or to help protect from tyranny--are drifting from freedom. We are alarmed. We want other nations to wake up before they drift too far. In beginning with a metaphor, I will say that if you fall asleep at the wheel--worse yet, if you let a self-destructive person drive your car with you in it--then you are in peril. You must leap into wakefulness and regain control if you are to survive. In beginning this new series, I would like to offer something of what America is rather that what it is not.
What America is can be summed up in one word: Freedom.
Some of you--whether American or not--may scoff. If you're not an American and you scoff, you should ask yourselves why so many of your countrymen wish to come here. You should ask yourselves why America continues to be so successful when other countries--perhaps including your own--have faltered. If you're an American, you should hear yourself as you exercise your freedom to scoff at the idea that America is the land of freedom. There are many countries in this world, including supposedly free countries in western Europe--countries that hold the graves of American soldiers--in which you are not permitted to speak freely, to speak ill of your government or its ways, or even to speak the truth or simple facts without fear of punishment.
I wish I could tell you what it means for us to reach this anniversary. We are proud of ourselves and our nation. We have every reason to feel that way. We, the American people, have accomplished so much in our time on this earth. But we also rightly and more accurately feel humble, for none of this was guaranteed. We have risked much and sacrificed much. Two hundred and fifty years ago, we entered into a great compact. We have again and again rededicated ourselves to that compact and to these propositions:
"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."
In that time, we have also continued in our efforts--in words written a dozen years later--to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." These blessings have come to us from that same Creator who endowed us with our rights. We recognize that we are not our own gods, for there can be only One. Again, none of this was guaranteed.
We are blessed because of the compact we have made. If we were to break that compact, it would all come crashing down. And so we must rededicate ourselves every day, most especially and most acutely on our Day of Independence, to hold to our founding ideals. On this and every day, we must devote ourselves, we must resolve--in words spoken fourscore and seven years after July 4, 1776--"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I wish I could tell you. But this is our sacred secular holiday, and maybe only we can feel it.
I invite good feelings from you and wish you well in your own quests to be free.
* * *
For three years in a row, I moved on July 4th. In one of those moves, I drove through a dark Missouri night and watched fireworks go off if the far distance, like meteors burning through the atmosphere, a celestial event over earthly places unknown to me, then or later. In America, we connect driving to freedom, cars to freedom, mobility to freedom. It was fitting that I drove to a new place and started a new life on Independence Day. Freedom includes freedom of movement. It helps that we can in America drive 10,000 miles--I did that two and a half years later--without once being stopped to have someone check our passports or papers. In America we don't have papers. Papers are a part of unfreedom. Free people go where they want without having to check in, without being tracked, without being held to account for any (legal) thing they do, or any place they go, or how long they spend there. Cars and driving and being on the road are part of being American. And so in this series I will write about these things, about automobiles and music and rocketships, once again about freedom and tyranny, and about two kinds of fiction, weird and science.
To be continued . . .
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| "Spirit of America," an advertisement for Chevrolet from 1974, getting ready, I guess, for the American Bicentennial, never mind the egregious misspelling. There's a line between celebration and economic exploitation (exploitation in the neutral sense). The advertisement above seems to have crossed that line. Nevertheless, it's a nice bit of nostalgia. I would take any one of these cars now, even the Vega. By the way, Nova and Vega are astronomical names. There will be more of those in this series. |
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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