Hoping for a sunny Fourth

Fun food: hot dogs, barbecue, pancake breakfasts, corn on the cob, watermelon. Parades: big (Redwood City) and small (Half Moon Bay) with baton twirlers, community groups, colorfully dressed Mexican dance troupes, and marching bands.

Warm weather: Enough with the wind already; and, depending on where you live, the evening display of fireworks may amount to little more than colorful clouds.

Fireworks: Jon Mays, the Daily Journal’s editor-en-jefe, already said all there is to say about the appalling decline in fireworks displays here on the Peninsula. The unconscionable elimination of civic-sponsored fireworks only invites more rogue aficionados to set off their own homemade explosions. Many of these guys are named Lefty.

And, oh yes, independence from tyranny, built on the still-radical belief that each of us has the unalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

In this sense, my understanding of these rights could be childlike, as well.

Still, they are core beliefs and I spend time at this time thinking about what it meant to include the “pursuit of happiness” particularly when so many seem unhappy, and some even seem to be actively pursuing misery, at least for others.

So, happiness. What a concept.

And liberty. They chose the liberty, which often is equated incorrectly with freedom. They are not the same thing, in definition or in practice. Freedom is unconstrained. The Declaration of Independence is not an assertion that we are free and independent to do whatever we want. The nation’s founders expected us to act in concert, protecting not only our own liberties, but those of each other. As George Constanza was known to assert, “You know, we’re living in a society.”

Even our most treasured rights contained in the Bill of Rights are not without limits. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”

For most of our first hundred years, the Declaration was considered a secondary document to the Constitution and the two are very different. The Constitution is a codification of compromises intended to hold together a loose association of states. The Declaration is poetry, the Constitution prose.

It was Abraham Lincoln who asserted the supremacy of the principles of the Declaration, particularly in the Gettysburg Address; as a result, after the Civil War and Lincoln’s presidency, the terminology of America moved from “these United States” to “the United States.” You know, like “one nation … indivisible.” Which we recited every day in school.

In the eighth grade at Parkside Junior High School, we all (and I think every eighth grader in California) had to pass what was called The Constitution Test. We had to learn all the branches of government, how bills became law, the names of our U.S. senators, all the Cabinet offices and officers, and more. You could not graduate unless you passed the test. I suspect it was not all that different from the test people have to take to become citizens.

I also suspect it is no coincidence that this same generation forced government to pass environmental regulations and end a war and expand the definition of our rights to include people who systematically had been denied them.

Living up to our expressed values has come to be labeled Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. But, really, it is just basic civics. Maybe the people who want to protect those things ought to be pushing it as an affirmative understanding of Americanism, rather than whatever they are doing.

It would be nice to see civics defined as patriotism. But it does require work, such as paying attention and showing up and the newest bugaboo — compromise.

As ancient Greece scholar Edith Hamilton wrote, “When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Anyway, the Fourth of July. Hot dogs, corn on the cob, pancakes — all things I am told not to eat any more. But, hey, I am an American. No one can tell me what to do.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He co-hosts a podcast/videocast that can be found at TheGamePeninsula.com, and he can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.