Red, White & Blue

The fireworks lit up the sky all evening in an explosive array of colors and shapes. The staccato noise echoed like rifle shots, sharp and startling against the music of the marching band in the background. There was shouting and cheering and applause. It was the 4th of July - steamy hot and humid, like being encased in a sauna, but no one seemed to mind. Children with sparklers and little Uncle Sam hats ran here and there, surrounding the hot dog cart in a clamoring mob. There were late night runners, weaving their way through the crowd, trying to maintain their pace and young mothers, pushing strollers with one hand and managing leashed dogs with the other. The marching band began "America" and everyone stopped and got to their feet - young and old, all of one mind, one spirit, and one voice. There was pride and solidarity in every note and it gave me chills.

"With freedom," we were taught in high school, "Comes responsibility." The words were just rhetoric then, a good phrase for an essay or term paper but with no real meaning. We were teenagers with no sense of war or country and we grew into young adults during Vietnam, a time of upheaval and protest against the government. Later we would outgrow some of our liberalism and shed some of our idealism and eventually we would find a center where we could reconcile without selling out. And here we stood, on a scathingly hot July night, celebrating Independence Day with fireworks and songs, with a sense of belonging and unity. We were diverse but unified, separate but together. We had yet to learn to disagree, this would come later as our stark black and white world began to fade to gray. Our moral certitude about everything would come under fire from within and like it or not, we would start down the road of doubt that my daddy had warned me about. "Precious few things," he had said with a sad smile, "Precious few things are absolutely right or absolutely wrong. It's far more complicated than that."

He would often take the opposite side in an argument just to test my logic and committment and perhaps to try and teach me to think things through. He was something of a philosopher about life, able to separate out the nonsense from the serious issues, able to show me the different sides of a coin. He worried that I worried too much about silly things and always tried to demonstrate the improbability of my fears coming true. We were on firm ground in the abstract and thin ice when it came to the reality of our family. While we could debate the death penalty into the ground or fight like dogs and cats over Nixon's presidency, we could not talk about my mother's drinking habits. We were together but apart, close but at arms length.

The Fourth of July is a good time to reflect on the cost of all kinds of freedom.