The only holiday I like less than July 4th is Halloween. I hate Halloween because it has become an excuse for juvenile gluttony and vandalism. When I was a boy, we were given little orange milk containers and asked to collect pennies for UNICEF to help hungry kids throughout the world. Now I open the door on Halloween and find pre-teens dressed like sluts who don’t even bother to say thank you when you give them candy. I also find egg yolks and shaving cream on my car and rolls of toilet paper on my lawn. What kind of holiday is that?
I dislike July 4th mostly because of the fireworks, especially the illegal ones my neighbors set off when I am sleeping. Even the spectacular pyrotechnic displays put on by local towns rub me the wrong way because they simulate and glorify war. Am I the only one at these patriotic celebrations who can’t help but imagine the intense horror felt by soldiers during war being bombarded by exploding shells?
July 4th has become Barbecues and Blown-Off Appendages Day, instead of what it should be, a celebration of one the greatest documents ever written in human history, the Declaration of Independence. The ideas so beautifully expressed by Jefferson were not invented by him. They evolved in Europe during a time period appropriately known as the Enlightenment Era with philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire. Instead of focusing on the Revolutionary War, we should be hailing the revolutionary idea that “all men are born with inalienable rights.” This was not accepted truth in the 18th century world ruled by monarchs who legitimized their power by “divine right.”
Jefferson further enumerated those rights: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is very similar to John Locke’s phrase, except Locke said we all have a right to property instead of happiness. How much loftier is Jefferson’s phrasing! Take note that we don’t have a right to happiness, but rather a fair chance to pursue it. If we had a right to happiness, the government would be compelled to issue Valium to all citizens. A fair chance to purse happiness includes the opportunity to seek out and possess those material goods necessary for health and welfare.
July 4th should be a celebration of these momentous ideals, but also a time to reflect on how far we have come towards achieving them. If we are honest with ourselves, I would suggest that we still fall very short of these goals. Take the most essential of our inalienable rights, the right to “life.” The phrase “right to life” has been co-opted by anti-abortionists in support of their belief that life begins at conception, but what I think Jefferson meant was that a person has a right to live his life free from the fear that someone else can arbitrarily take it away. Though Jefferson was a slave owner, his expression of life as a right can be applied to arguments against slavery, unjustified imprisonment, and even capital punishment.
In today’s world, I think the right to life has taken on another meaning, one that Jefferson could hardly have imagined. As Al Gore has put it, the “inconvenient truth” is that we, as citizens of the earth, have altered this planet so drastically that our right to life is threatened. Ironically, in our immoderate pursuit of happiness, we have poured so much carbon into the atmosphere that there is no returning to life as we once knew it. The environmental activist Bill McKibben sums up the effects of global warming caused by burning of fossil fuels:
“The planet we inhabit has a finite number of huge physical features. Virtually all of them seem to be changing rapidly: the Arctic ice cap is melting, and the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans, which cover three-fourths of the earth’s surface, are distinctly more acid and their level is rising; they are also warmer, which means the greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful. The vast inland glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, and the giant snowpack of the American West, are melting very fast, and within decades the supply of water to the billions of people living downstream may dwindle. The great rainforest of the Amazon is drying on its margins and threatened at its core. The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years. The great storehouses of oil beneath the earth’s crust are now more empty than full. Every one of these things is completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilization…We have traveled to a new planet on a burst of carbon dioxide.”
Who is to blame for creating this new earth that jeopardizes our inalienable right to life? It’s too easy to point fingers at politicians and huge corporations. Of course, politicians, who should have been listening to the warnings of scientists as far back the 1970s, listened to the big oil and car companies instead. But politicians simply followed the lead of the people, who demanded more cars and an ever-growing economy. It turns out that we are all to blame. We the people are giving away our right to life on this planet.
I am amazed by the hypocrisy of finger-pointing for the BP oil disaster. It seems obvious that greed trumped precaution in the deep-drilling decision-making process, but the more basic cause of the worst environmental disaster in history is that we have finally come to the point at which we are forced to drill deeper and deeper into the earth to find new sources of oil. We are addicted to oil, to our cars, and to the idea of perpetual economic growth. I don’t think Jefferson could foresee how our right to pursue happiness might lead to the potential death of the planet, but that’s exactly the prospect we are now facing.
The first item I heard on the news this July 4th morning was that a man shooting off a mortar to celebrate the holiday accidentally shot off his arm instead. What a perfect metaphor for what we are doing to our own earth this July 4th 2010. Have a safe holiday.
