The 4th
of July – Independence Day.
Tonight, in Boston, we are promised a
spectacle firework display. The small town we visited a couple of days
ago had raised $30,000 for the local 4th July celebrations – a
tradition of fireworks going back to the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
There is great
excitement and a wonderful feeling of optimism. Yesterday a group of children
who were sailing a fleet of Optimist dinghies past our boat spontaneously and
enthusiastically started singing the American anthem ‘Star Spangled
Banner’. The stars and stripes flag is everywhere
- and I am beginning to understand a little of its importance in
terms of allegiance and what it symbolises.
Despite the events of the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre and
the battle of Bunker Hill against Britain, it could be deemed that in the
mid-1700s the Americans were already very free people: they could vote
for their own representatives (more than most Brits could do), had a free press
and relatively high standards of literacy (the rate was at least double that of
Britain). Despite protestation, it
is estimated that in the early 1760s the average American paid one fiftieth of
the tax paid by his British counterpart. The strike for independence was
not therefore to secure America’s
freedom, but to preserve it.
The Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, held
“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
At the beginning of that year a spark which rallied the Americans to action
came in the form of a passionate and eloquently written pamphlet by Thomas
Paine called Common Sense. It
sold a staggering 100,000 copies in the first two months, 400,000 copies
overall, in a county with just three million inhabitants. Not only did it
ruthlessly attack the monarch, but it was compelling in the demand for
independence: ‘Everything that is right and reasonable pleads for
separation.’ He was also the first to refer to the ‘United States of America’.
The American
anthem was inspired by a young American lawyer who was in the midst of the
bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore
Harbour during the war of
1812. Despite explosives being
fired at the fort throughout the night, when dawn broke he saw the American
flag still flying, tattered and defiant: ‘Oh say! Does
that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home
of the brave?’
I love the
passion for freedom and the respect for unity of their nation that runs deep in
the American psyche. It is also wonderful to have the pursuit of
happiness as a fundamental right, which spawns everyday niceties. -
Even the neon sign on the bus that we travelled on today said ‘Have a
Great Day’.
