A Birthday Party for a Country

Everybody loves a good ol’ fashioned birthday party, right? Birthday parties are a special time to commemorate surviving another lap around the sun. Parents love to break the bank on parties for children too young to understand what is happening. In return, children then go overboard on parties for their parents who are too old to remember what they had for breakfast.

There are going to be countless parties and BBQs today in celebration of our independence. There will buckets of beans, piles of potato salad, and enough beef on the grill to fill the Statue of Liberty. Fireworks will light the sky and kids will play with sparklers. Neighborhood firecrackers will send dogs scurrying under beds and flag-shaped cakes dotted with blueberries will be featured on Facebook.

These will be wonderful celebrations, but they won’t be birthday parties. So let’s throw America a birthday party. To start, we’ll need a location. Philadelphia comes to mind. Although, there are 20 states that have towns called Freedom. Nine states have cities named Independence. I’ll go with Missouri’s since it is centrally located and the most well-known.

What about the guest list? Anyone who calls themselves an American is invited. But this will be a party without hyphens. For a day, we won’t be Italian-Americans, or African-American, or Asian-Americans. If you came to this country to seek a better life or if you’re descended from someone who crossed the Pacific, the Rio Grande, or the Atlantic yearning to breathe free then you’re invited. There will have to be a small admission fee, because living in this country takes sacrifice and our freedom has cost many patriotic lives. That said, all veterans and current members of the armed forces will get in free.

The menu will be as eclectic as the makeup of our country. A melting pot of foods and flavors will join together to represent the people of all nationalities who have come to America and worked to build it into a great republic over the last 239 years. Imagine a feast with not just hotdogs and apple pie, but enchiladas, lomo saltado, spring rolls, corned beef, yakisoba, egusi soup, tandori chicken, baklava, and ravioli. The dessert table alone will be impressive: biscotti and cannoli, macaroons and tea cakes, stroopwafels, flodebollers, and sopapillas with a side of dolce de leche.

I’d like to bring in the Reverend Billy Graham to bless the meal, but because America is a built on freedom of religion everybody in attendance will be free to give thanks in their own way, or respectfully abstain if they so choose.

Entertainment? Of course! But there might not be enough hours in the day to fully allow for all of the music and dancing to take place. We’ll need sound stages to be erected for music from jazz to mariachi. We’ll need dance floors laid out to hold the rhythmic styles from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Every tree can hold a piñata for the kids and the old men can play bocce ball and toss horse shoes.  

Think of the conversations to be had around the fire pits as the sun goes down. I’d want to talk to a WWII vet, or a New York City firefighter, or a member of NASA who worked to send Neil Armstrong to the moon. Then the slideshow will start. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, we’d see shots of famous people and video clips of historic moments. We’d hear sound bites of memorably monogrammed speeches from FDR to MLK to JFK.

Lastly, when the dark of night had completely arrived, the fireworks will start. And with the background music playing, my mind will wander. I’d think about how thankful I am to live in this great country ours. And that even though it has many zits, and scars, issues and problems America is still the leader of the free world. It’s a country full of the most generous, forgiving, creative, innovative, courageous, driven, and victorious people in the world.

And despite its problems, it is still the country where people write the scripts of their own lives. It’s a place where one’s destiny is not predetermined. Every American is a writer, a producer, and a director of the movie of their own lives. “What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice – these are all decisions that Americans make for themselves,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in the book “What’s So Great About America”. And as the last rocket blasts its red glare I will wonder if that’s what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he penned the phrase, “Pursuit of Happiness.” I think it is.

So as we all take a break from our pursuits today, don’t forget to wish our great nation a happy birthday. Fly your flags. Be thankful for freedom and independence. 

And then pass me a cannoli.