One Week Left

A week from today will be the 4th of July, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's supposed to be a big deal.

But it will, of course, be just another day in the grand scheme of things, and even in the life of the nation. Especially given that so many people have fundamental disagreements of what, if anything, there is to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "A House divided against itself cannot stand," but the United States has always been divided, often in multiple ways, and it's still here. The Trump Administration may not be doing much to bring the nation together (unsurprising, given how few people seem to genuinely want such an outcome), but even they are unlikely to bring the whole enterprise down around everyone's heads.

And so life will go on. As it has for all of the years before. Because change is expensive, and very few people feel flush enough to pay what it asks. And so they don't volunteer. And when change has to happen, the costs are passed along until they find someone with no choice but to cough up. And because the perception of scarcity is perhaps the biggest threat to self-governance, the American version of representative and participatory government seems to be at risk, even as it's grown to encompass a vast number of people that, in 1776, were not considered to have the requisite powers of reason to be allowed to have a say in things.

The trade-offs that would need to be made to improve things are straightforward, but also easier said than done, because someone's going to have to be the first person to extend a hand, even though there's a very real chance that it will be cut off, because one should never give a villain an even break. And sometimes, this comes across as a society that dearly loves to have villains.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as deserves. The world is as it is, and there is no way in which it ought to be different. If one wants it to change, then one's task is to effectuate that change, either on one's own, or with a group of the like-minded. But, of course, there's more to it than that, because someone will have to pay the price for those changes, and if that feels more like a sacrifice (or theft) than an investment, there will be resistance. And to the degree that such resistance is taken to be the proof of one's correctness, it's cultivated. And so there will be grievance and resentment on what should be a nationwide celebration.

Because the United States of America is made up of people, just like everywhere else is. Perhaps there needs to be a greater recognition of that. That would also be something to celebrate.