How independent are we on this Fourth of July?

Sleepwalking

July 2, 2007 5:15:09 PM

Dawn skims across the main streets of America while gentle summer breezes spin red, white, and blue remnants of this week’s Fourth of July parades. The trumpets and the big base drums are silent now; the bunting-draped reviewing stands bereft of officials and their honored guests.

In the elegant bedrooms of seaside mansions and on futons in city tenements, Fourth of July observers sleep the heavy sleep of too much celebrating. What they were celebrating is unclear.

This once-patriotic holiday — the highlight of summer — has become an excuse for a cookout, a reason to get high on the beach, a day off in a period when workers take all or part of their mandated two-week respite. Grandma gets invited to eat hamburgers while the grandchildren play with illegal firecrackers Uncle Harry bought off the back of a truck on Route 6.

By noon on July 5, the news will report the usual numbers of fights, fires, drownings, alcohol-related auto accidents, and injuries from those illegal fireworks.

Some of the victims will be recognizable in the small towns across the nation where everyone knows everyone. Others will remain nameless, “pending notification of next of kin.” Also in that category will be the four, 10, 22, or 36 people killed in Iraq on Independence Day.

Unknowing wives, lovers, and parents will drink their coffee on July 5 and think about the need to clean up after the previous day’s party, while the heralds of death, in full military dress, head out to bear the sad news. One more of “America’s finest” is dead, for a still undefined cause. We have become so numb to the daily roster of the dead that we hardly notice.

How independent are we this Independence Day, and at what price?

Enslaved by our need for oil, victimized by a government driven by polls, and terrorized by a global enemy made stronger by our misguided foreign policy, we have lost many of our friends and expanded our list of foes. We are not so much independent as we are isolated, not so powerful as defensive, and less victorious than blockheaded.

The cost of all that?

Some 3800 dead soldiers, 29,129 military wounded, and 68,000 civilian fatalities (according to www.antiwar.com and Newsweek). Nobel prize-winner Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes tell the Christian Science Monitor that they project the cost of the war at more than $2 trillion.

President Bush says he must veto the stem cell research bill because “human life is precious.” Tell that to a mother in Iowa or a lover in Miami after those full-dress officers ring the doorbell to announce that loved ones were blown up in Baghdad.

The real July 4 flags, removed from caskets and folded into neat triangles, were handed to weeping survivors while trumpets like those in Main Street parades played taps. But on Independence Day, the nation turned a deaf ear.