We are heading into the Fourth of July weekend. I see some neighbors loading up their cars to travel. Others are heading to the L with their suitcases, going to one of the airports or train stations.
When I was young, the Fourth of July was a celebration and feast. There was barbeque, all kinds of side dishes, pop, wine, and beer, desserts, and enjoying the company of family and friends.
As I got older, the Fourth of July turned into one of Chicago’s drinking and puking fests. Instead of homemade well-crafted food, people drink and eat all the crap that the ad companies brainwashed them into believing are “traditional Fourth of July fare.
Like St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve, and other amateur drinking and puking holidays, the Fourth turned into just another day or three-day weekend of drunken revelry.
In the city’s drunken and porcelain bus stupor, we forget the reason we celebrate, the Declaration of Independence. The document that preceded the war and bloodshed against the colonial Brits. The document started us on the road to forge a nation and a noble experiment of governance.
“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 .”
Since those ideals and words were written and embodied, we have fought tooth and nail to deprive each other of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are still fighting today, 245 years later. We will keep fighting each other because those were ideals that could never be met. The Founders did not take in the human condition when they penned those noble ideals.
We might be equal in the eyes of God, the Creator, the Great Comedian, or whatever you call them. We have violated those unalienable rights on a mass scale since the formation of this great nation. Sometimes I think the Great Comedian is laughing at his cruel joke. He created some people to thrive and others to struggle and suffer.
To this day, we are still fighting for equality, or the new term, equity. We are fighting the federal and state governments, the two clown show political parties, the City Hall circus, and each other.
We may live in peace, but the only harmony is the cacophony of voices demanding their rights while excluding the rights of others, claiming the bull manure of culture, values, and morals. We are fighting a news media that opines rights are not inalienable. At the same time, they bitterly cling to their right to publish horse manure.
So, people celebrate the Fourth in drunken stupidity. Instead of celebrating the ideal and vowing to do better, they forget the past and present sins. They focus on clinging to the porcelain bus.
The Fourth of July celebrates a noble ideal. Maybe we should start living that ideal instead of squabbling about who has the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There are only two great equalizers in life. Birth and death. All babies are created equal at birth, naked and wet. We are all going to die. In between, we are clothed and wet-brained.