CELEBRATING WHICH 4th?

This coming 4th of July we will celebrate the birth of the United States. But now 234 years later, we have to wonder exactly how united our many different states-of-mind really are. Diversity has always made us more "pluribis" than "unum;" however, never more so than this coming 4th.

In the past, we divided mostly along racial, ethnic and religious boundaries. While those rifts are still splattered with the blood of our prides and prejudices, the newest rifts among us run dangerously deeper. Right down to the loosening tectonic plates upon which our nation was built. Listening to those upcoming speeches and songs, we won't hear these rifts. But we may be able to sense them in between some of the lines and the lyrics.

About a third of us feel a sinking sensation of national helplessness [Nothing's going right, but at my age if I can just hold on a few years more, I won't give a damn!].

Another third feel an angry sensation beckoning them to political protest [Washington is broken, but I'm still young enough to fix it by bringing back the America I remember!]

The youngest third feel what youth always feels: Give the reins to us [We'll ride this bronco the way it should be, because the world belongs to the young!]

If that adds up to near 100%, what small slice of us are left to still recall and recapture a very different set of national feelings? The feelings that surged through the tattered ranks at Valley Forge...that thrilled to the boom years of the great new paddlewheelers and railroads...that inflamed the troops on both sides of Gettysburg, because they really knew what they were willing to die for....that made us charge into the 20th century in love with our explosion of cars and highways and radios and television sets and penicillin and vaccines and the all-for-one battle-cry that kept the plagues of Nazism and Communism from consuming our planet.

Those national feelings must still burn somewhere. But maybe now only as embers to be stirred every 4th rather than as torches to be carried back home with us. It's this small slice of us who may yet decide "unum" rules over "pluribus." Who may yet be willing to hear the trumpets from the leaders they elected. Who may yet sense our Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, was right that July 1776 when he said: "Now we must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately...."