This Country’s Been to Worse Fourth of July Cookouts Than This One

America turns 250 this weekend, and she’s celebrating the way most of us celebrate a milestone birthday: sweating through her shirt, surrounded by relatives who aren’t speaking to each other, quietly wondering where the time went.

Let’s be honest about where we are, because I think honesty is the only birthday gift worth giving.

It is dangerously hot everywhere. The heat index hit 115 in some areas, and they had to shut down the fair on the National Mall for the afternoon while folks huddled in misting tents, which is a reasonable thing to do when the air feels like the inside of a dryer vent.

But the heat is the least of it. We are divided in ways that would make a church business meeting look harmonious. We are at war with Iran. We are tired of each other in a deep, bone-level way that no amount of bunting can cover. The reflecting pool, both the literal one and the metaphorical one, could use some work. Half the country believes the other half is trying to burn the house down, and the other half believes the same thing right back, and everybody’s got a hose pointed at a fire that mostly exists on their phones.

Meanwhile, Milwaukee is celebrating with a drone show featuring drones that shoot sparks, which is either the future of patriotism or the opening scene of a Terminator movie. I haven’t decided which.

So yes. It is a hard year to throw a birthday party.

But I went digging through the history books this week, because that’s what I do when the present gets loud, and I discovered something worth passing along.

The Fourth of July has almost never landed on a good year.

Start with the very first one. July 4, 1776, was not a celebration. It was a group of men in wool coats, in a Philadelphia summer with no air conditioning, signing a document that the British government considered a confession of guilt. The British fleet was already gathering in New York Harbor. Benjamin Franklin reportedly said they must all hang together or they would most assuredly hang separately.

I will remind you again that Ben Franklin was a newspaperman. Gallows humor was our thing back then as well.

Jump ahead to 1814. The British burned Washington that summer. The country was 38 years old and the party guests set the house on fire.

July 4, 1863. The battle of Gettysburg had ended the day before, with 50,000 casualties. Vicksburg surrendered that very morning. Half the country wasn’t celebrating the Fourth at all. Vicksburg, Mississippi, in fact, mostly declined to celebrate Independence Day for roughly 80 years afterward, which I understand. Southerners can hold a grudge like it’s a family heirloom.

July 4, 1918, American boys were in the trenches in France, and a flu was quietly warming up in the wings that would kill more people than the war did.

July 4, 1932, a quarter of the country was out of work, and thousands of desperate veterans were camped in shacks within sight of the Capitol, asking to be paid what they were owed.

July 4, 1942, came six months after Pearl Harbor. Fireworks were canceled up and down the coasts because of blackout rules. The country celebrated its birthday in the dark, on purpose, so enemy submarines couldn’t see the shoreline.

July 4, 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King had been dead for three months. Bobby Kennedy for one. Cities had burned. Vietnam was swallowing a generation. And people still grilled hamburgers, because what else do you do?

And then there’s 1976. The Bicentennial. We remember it now as tall ships and fire hydrants painted like Minutemen, this big joyful national party. What we forget is the context. It came one year after Saigon fell and two years after a president resigned in disgrace. The country was cynical, exhausted, and broke. And people showed up anyway. Millions of them. They lined the harbors and the parade routes because being together felt better than being right.

So no, this is not the first hard Fourth. It might not even crack the top five. The country has celebrated its birthday during wars, plagues, depressions, and at least one occasion when the White House was actively — and literally — on fire.

Which brings me to the traditions, because the traditions are the point.

Today, Americans will eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million hot dogs. Nobody knows what’s in them and nobody asks, which may be the most unifying act of faith this country still performs. There will be barbecue, and there will be arguments about barbecue, and both are sacred. There will be small-town parades where the fire truck goes eight miles an hour and kids on bicycles with crepe paper in the spokes wobble along behind it, and every single person watching will clap like it’s the Rose Bowl.

There will be fireworks tonight, heat permitting, and some guy named Randy in every neighborhood in America will attempt his own unauthorized show, and his neighbors will watch from lawn chairs with a garden hose nearby, and this too is tradition.

There will be Sousa marches. There will be somebody’s aunt singing along to Lee Greenwood with her hand over her heart and a paper plate of baked beans balanced on her knee. If you’re lucky, somebody will play the Ray Charles version of “America the Beautiful,” which I maintain is the finest recording ever made about this country, because Ray sang it like a man who knew everything wrong with the place and loved it anyway.

At my house, The Wild Things will eat hamburgers, baked beans, drink sweet tea, and demand copious amounts of candy and ice cream because “it’s a holiday.” My wife and I will largely acquiesce to most of their demands.

And here is what I want you to notice about every one of those scenes. Nobody at a cookout asks your politics before handing you a plate. Nobody at a parade checks the voter registration of the family next to them before sharing shade. For one loud, sweaty, overcooked day a year, we practice being what we keep saying we are.

Eleven years after the Declaration of Independence, the framers of the Constitution wrote that they were forming “a more perfect Union.” People skip past that phrase, but look at it. More perfect. That’s a comparative. They didn’t claim perfection. They didn’t even promise it. They set a direction and admitted, right there in the opening sentence, that the work would never quite be done. The Constitution’s preamble reads less like a trophy inscription and more like a to-do list nailed to the door for whoever comes next.

That’s us. We’re whoever comes next.

Two hundred fifty years is a long time for anything to hold together, let alone something held together by nothing more than a shared idea, some very good documents, and an unreasonable amount of potato salad. Empires with armies and bloodlines have not lasted this long. We’ve done it with arguments, elections, casseroles, and a stubborn refusal to give up on each other that survives even the years when we’d swear it hasn’t.

This is a hard year. Fine. It was born in a hard year. It has spent most of its birthdays in hard years, and it has spent 250 of them showing up anyway.

So find some shade. Drink some water. Eat a hot dog. Wave at the fire truck. Watch the sky light up tonight, whether it’s fireworks or spark-shooting robot drones from the future.

And when you look around at the neighbors in the lawn chairs next to you, the ones you’ve been told are your enemies, try to remember that they showed up to the same party you did, to celebrate the same thing you’re celebrating.

Abraham Lincoln famously posed the question of whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. At the time he posed the question, this country was not even 100 years old yet. This nation made it to 100 years, made it to 200 years, and has endured to the present day.

Whether or not it endures another 250 years isn’t up to the rich, the powerful, the lobbyists, or the corporations. It us up to We The People. This weekend is about We The People. Whether its outside, inside, or in a swimming pool, We The People will eat hot dogs, wave flags, watch parades, and experience fireworks — because We The People aren’t as divided as we’ve been told we need to be.

Happy Independence Day, America!