I hope all of you had a decent Fourth of July weekend. I say decent because everybody loves to say a “great Fourth of July weekend” and frankly, the Fourth of July is never great. Okay, maybe the one in 1776 was great but the rest of them have just been sequels, and sequels never live up to the original. If you managed to keep all your fingers, keep out of the all the DUI checkpoints, and keep your hangover to a minimum, well then, that’s about as decent a Fourth of July as you’re gonna get.

More decent than this guy’s.

Personally, the Fourth of July is my ninth favorite of the ten federal holidays, just inching out Columbus Day cause fuck that dude. Throw in the unofficial holidays like Halloween, St Patrick’s Day, and the Super Bowl, and the Fourth of July drops down to somewhere in the teens for me. It’s not like I don’t understand the significance of the day or its importance in our nation’s history. I don’t like the Fourth of July for the same reason I don’t like to see old pictures of myself; because it is just another reminder of how much potential we had and how much we’ve let ourselves go.

How many times have you heard, “America is the greatest country in the world!”? Between Presidential speeches, fireworks shows, and Fox News, my guess is you’ve heard it plenty – especially this past weekend. I am wondering upon what this claim can be based. Now, I want you to really think about that. Freedom? That is the answer I hear the most. “America is the greatest country because we have the most freedom!” First of all, that is not even accurate. Go ask a gay person who wants to get married or join the military how much freedom we have. And secondly, it doesn’t even make sense. If the measure of a country’s greatness is determined by the freedom of its citizens then the greatest country in the world is Somalia. They don’t even have a government. You can do anything you want over there.

“Obama can’t take our guns!”

Granted, exercising your Somali freedom can lead to death by starvation, AK-47 or Navy Seal, but nonetheless, you’re free to do as you wish. So freedom can’t be the reason America is so great. What else? Money? We certainly have plenty of that. Military might? Oh yeah. We can kick ass with the best of them. But if our greatness comes from the fact that we’re rich and can beat up everybody else, then basically we’ve become Johnny from “The Karate Kid” and is that really so great?

Johnny Lawrence: American Greatness

The last time I checked, everybody in America dies just like everywhere else. So we can’t be that great. It would be a different matter if we had some immortals running around. Because, let’s face it, that is what everybody wants, right? Immortality? There is a school of thought out there that hypothesizes that most negative human behavior, from violent patriotism to religious extremism to infatuation with vampire movies, stems from the basic fear of death. Now, if we didn’t have that fear because we actually could achieve immortality then, hell yeah, I’d be onboard that whole “Great America” train. But we can’t, so I won’t.
Now there will be those that read this and say the same bullshit I always hear when I question our country’s greatness. “If you don’t like it, then you can leave!” Like the country where you were born into citizenship is nothing more than a neighborhood full of meth labs you can just pack your bags and move away from. It is that kind of thinking that got us here. I would argue that it is more neighborly and more patriotic to want to clean up this hood. Fix the problems instead of waiting for somebody else to do it. Rather than being the fat, lazy, son of the CEO, who inherits his father’s company then proceeds to run it into the ground through ineptitude and inaction, I want to be the guy who starts off in the mail room and works his way up, improving it as he goes. You know, The American Dream. Remember that idea? It’s what once made this country great and the only thing that is going to save it from going straight into the shitter.