Editorial: A Quieter Fourth Of July To Reflect On Togetherness As Well As Freedom
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle Editorial Board
Photo: A masked man protests Michigan’s stay-at-home order in May. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press)
Today we’re celebrating, if not with our usual enthusiasm, a separation. Our national birthday party commemorates not the Constitution that began to truly unite the states — while pointedly securing their rights for good and ill — but rather the colonies’ Declaration of Independence from a distant monarchy. It’s one reason for Americans’ attachment to freedom as our first founding principle.
Stripping our past and present down to abstractions, however, renders both unrecognizable. Our founding documents secured hard-won, world-altering freedoms for some, enshrined the enslavement of others and sowed the seeds of secession and oppression from which the struggle to emerge continues into our 245th year.
The declaration ushered in eight years of war — more than a decade counting the second conflict with Britain — to which the newly declared states did not enter as favorites to free themselves from a world-spanning empire. Considering all that followed, however, from the Constitutional Convention through the Civil War and civil rights to today’s deep divides along racial, regional and political lines, uniting the states in freedom has been a far longer and costlier struggle than the one that freed them from their former rulers.
Our fractious response to the current crisis, the pandemic that has cost nearly 130,000 American lives over five months, has persisted to the point of dampening these Fourth of July festivities for those families who are fortunate enough to be celebrating at all. Instead of summoning us to unite in a national struggle against a common threat, President Trump and too many of his fellow politicians have persisted in inflaming the divisions among states and people.
Some of the American freedoms he and others champion are not so much fundamental to our existence as a nation as they are antithetical. We’re declaring ourselves free from reality and responsibility, free to refuse any sacrifice or inconvenience, free to dispute or outright ignore science and facts.
It’s difficult to conjure a more perverse appropriation of the founding struggle than the cries from the president and others to “liberate” states from temporary closures that gave thousands the freedom to continue living. The pretense that this misbegotten resistance had anything to do with protecting livelihoods falls apart in light of the protests against the small discomfort of donning masks, which haven’t hurt anyone’s business; on the contrary, they have created a whole new category of consumer goods.
Amid division over the freedom to sicken others by going unmasked or sicken ourselves with false cures, the mass protests against police violence, and the broad public support for them despite Trump’s worst efforts, point to a belated but hopeful uniting behind fully extending the freedoms the founders sought to more Americans.
That is worth celebrating in the spirit, if not the physical fact, of coming together.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.