Fireworks, Flags, and the Unfinished Declaration
Fireworks, Flags, and the Unfinished Declaration
I don’t know when I last read the Declaration of Independence before tonight. But I did – in its entirety – and I commend it to you.
It is worth reading, not just as a historic document but as a reminder of what people will risk when they believe freedom is possible. It is worth reading to see what they missed, too – who they left out, what they assumed, what they stole. It is worth reading because, like fireworks, its words illuminate the night sky of who we were, who we are, and who we might yet become.
I have always been drawn to fireworks. Even as a child, whether it was a family roadside desert roman candle extraveganza or driveway lit snakes and sparklers or later the black July skies with their fleeting blooms – crackling chrysanthemums of silver and gold, weeping willow trails dissolving into the dark. They lit something in me I didn’t yet have words for. Wonder, yes. Hope, maybe. The promise that for a moment, the world can be beautiful and burning all at once.
In a few days, it will be the Fourth of July. For the first time in my 66 years, I feel like flying an American flag.
That may sound ordinary. Natural, even. But it isn’t for me. I came of age in the ragged, riotous 1970s. Nixon’s resignation weighed heavy after Watergate. Vietnam raged its dying throes, leaving amputations of hope. The Gay Rights movement whispered its truths into a world not ready to listen. Women marched with fists half-raised and half-shaking. Inflation ballooned, hostages were taken in Tehran, and the flag felt like something pressed against my mouth to keep me quiet.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…
But I didn’t feel equal. Not as a girl whose desire bent toward other girls. Not as a young woman trying to find her place in a world with narrow lanes and rigid borders. I thought rejecting the flag was rejecting injustice. I didn’t yet understand that symbols, like fireworks, can carry more than one meaning. That traditions can hold hope as well as history. That reclaiming them is sometimes the bravest thing we can do.
That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…
Over time, life taught me what freedom can hold if we let it breathe. I raised a daughter not born on this land but now of it, her beautiful brown face reminding me daily how freedom tastes different depending on who you are. I have loved a woman for thirty years – thirteen of them legally, all of them fully. I’ve come to see that freedom isn’t a possession. It’s a practice. A promise. A hope we renew with each generation.
But this land we call America was never truly ours to begin with. It was honored first by people who stewarded it for thousands of years before colonists arrived with declarations of freedom in one hand and muskets in the other. We declared independence from tyranny even as we invaded the homelands of others, driving them away to claim a promise we believed was only for us.
The Declaration of Independence was a bold and imperfect act. It listed every injury from a tyrant king:
He has obstructed the administration of justice… He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures… He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power…
It declared freedom from tyranny while so many remained enslaved, while Indigenous peoples faced violent removal and erasure. Black Americans heard its words as an unfulfilled prophecy and made them their own. Frederick Douglass asked, what to the American slave is your Fourth of July? Harriet Tubman walked people to freedom under silent stars. Martin Luther King Jr. held up this Declaration like a mirror to a nation refusing to see its face.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
We are called still today. There are long trains of abuses running through our headlines now, not only in America but across the world – new tyrannies rising in familiar shapes, wars that punish civilians, leaders that cling to power with closed fists, divisions sown like weeds between neighbors. Yet I believe in symbols. I believe in traditions. I believe in reclaiming what has been misused and making it again into something true.
Flying the flag this year feels like claiming a promise that is not yet complete. It is not about ignoring what is broken. It is about believing in what can be mended. Because freedom is not a single declaration or an unbroken truth. It is a thing you carry in your chest like a stubborn star, flickering even when the night is blackest.
I guess you need to feel you’re losing what you love to understand it was worth fighting for all along. Some of us are late bloomers. But I am here now. All in.
And so tonight, after reading the Declaration, I find myself standing in its long shadow and its fierce, flickering possibility. Freedom is never simple. It is complicated, unfinished, and always worth the struggle.
May we read the old words and write new ones with our lives. May we see clearly these times – a world aching with injustice, an earth strained with grief, and still so many hearts stubborn enough to hope.
May we be brave enough to tell the truth of where this country began, where it has failed, and where it can yet go. May we carry forward what is good, dismantle what is destructive, and rise each morning committed to freedom as a promise we keep alive together.
This Fourth of July, may the fireworks remind us not just of what has been won, but of what remains to be done – and may we walk forward, humble and resolute, until life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ring true for every person under this wide and waiting sky.