america is

It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall

-Phil Ochs, "I Ain't Marching Anymore" (1965)

It's July fourth.

The fourth of July. Independence Day.

It's a summer day that came and went throughout much of my childhood. I watched the festivities and celebrations from afar with underdeveloped and under-tapped critical thinking skills.

It was one of the three major days during the year that my dad would unfurl the stars and stripes from whatever storage place in the garage it called home. Depending on where we were living at the time, he would display it inside a prominent window, hang it from the roof near our balcony, or draw it up the flagpole like a lynching of a forgotten ideal.

In the afternoon we'd probably barbeque some dead animal, munch from the family size bag of potato chips, and quench our thirst on iced tea. There'd be innumerable treats to choose from, with the dessert being the booming, bright, and colorful fireworks display with the other hordes of the blanket spreading clan. This would be a rare opportunity to be out past dark. All of these celebratory things could surely give an impressionable child the idea that things are great in the good old US of A.

I come from a military family. My grandfather was at Iwo Jima. He was a marine. What I know of him wouldn't fill a chapter in a book, but I know he was a wartime painter who crafted many a battle scene in all of its wartime raw imagery. He was also a poet and author, who became the subject of a poetry essay I put together in ninth grade. Even though this was my dad's adoptive father and not a blood relative, the five dollars he'd give me for writing book reports for him when I was seven years old I call out as the reason I love writing to this day.

My dad was in the Air Force and then the Navy. My brother followed in the familial footsteps and has become far more career military than anyone suspected when he enlisted nearly twenty years ago. There was a regimented nature to our household complete with hospital corners on our beds and a need for my dad to come into our rooms on weekend mornings doing a loud rendition of revelry.

There was always this overwhelming threat when you pushed the limits of acceptable taste or behavior in our household. It always seemed to come up. Military school. I would be hard pressed to count how many times I was "this" close to being "sent away". Thinking about it now, I haven't a clue if these these things really exist. Whatever the case, I feel that I grew up in a microcosm of my perspective of America. We're in constant need of creating little soldiers to go off to war.

We just finished watching the recent John Cusack film, "Grace is Gone". It's an intimate, affecting drama about a conventional Middle American guy who's lost his wife in Iraq and can't muster up the strength to break the news to his children. There's an underlying anti-war message that shows the complexity of fighting for what you believe in, but then having to deal with the detrimental effects of believing in it on a more personal level. I found it to be quite powerful and I highly recommend it!

It should be clear from reading my blogs that I apparently loathe all holidays. More definitively it's probably more the blindness which people seem to approach them. Most of them become a consumer event. We are told to shop, shop, shop! Perhaps it'll keep us from realizing that the holiday we are shopping under the auspices of represents the death of soldiers or the pillaging of a Native Culture.

It's not as if I shy away from July fourth. I just don't like to celebrate it, except in contradictory ways. For example, last year we watched a documentary about the 2000 election. I guess America and I are in the midst of an angry argument. In the way that once things go sour in relationship it appears that the whole thing was always so bad. I know it's not the whole picture. It's the photo negative of that sanitized show we saw at Epcot Center last February. It's the one that has Ben Franklin chatting it up about the great history of the US. It felt like one extended euphemism filled patriotic propaganda show.

So, it's Independence Day. That should stand for something.

I have no answers.

Let's just say that freedom is more than just a figment of our collective imagination in need of pursuit.

Then, what are you doing with yours?