The Birthday of Our Country

Have you ever been to a birthday party where all anyone talked about was when the guest of honor was an infant? “So big at 9 pounds 8 ounces.” “She never cried, such a good baby.” “Little round bald headed baby.” And there stands the 21-year-old who graduated college. The forty-year-old raising his own family now. The fifty-year-old surviving a bitter divorce. The sixty-year-old who looked up and realized there was more to life than her job. The seventy-year-old who’s grown grumpy. The eighty-year-old whose heart has mellowed into acceptance. “She came out wrinkled but smoothed up real fast.”

No one does that, no one. Why do we do it to on the birthday of our country?

The narrow focus on our founding—and not our life—is ultra-strange. We should be celebrating Lincoln as much as Jefferson. W. E. B. Du Bois and John Adams. Ida B. Wells with Thomas Payne. Albert Einstein with Thomas Edison. Ann Richards AND Betsy Ross. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and James Madison. When we don’t, we’re perhaps celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, as did the founders with sack races and pony rides and hotdog eating contests. But we’re not celebrating the birthday of our country.