It is a fact universally accepted that the best two holidays of the year are Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.
OK, so maybe that's not universally accepted. But it's a fact as far as I'm concerned. I like the low-key ambience of both holidays, the emphasis on food and family. I also like what the two holidays — the two most uniquely American holidays on the calendar — represent.
The flags, the fireworks, the retelling of our national birth story with its twin themes of individual freedom and national independence — the hallmarks of the Fourth drip with patriotic meaning. It's good to take a day — and even better a day stretched into a three-day weekend — to remind ourselves what this country has accomplished, what it has given the world and what its future can hold.
In recent weeks, we've seen tragic examples of how precious freedom can be. The snippets of video coming out of Iran have been heartening and heartbreaking, vivid evidence of the heroic risks that ordinary people sometimes take in pursuit of freedom.
However, freedom is a lot more complicated than getting to do what you want and say what you want. If that's all there was to it, freedom would be a lot more rampant around the world.
Freedom is hard because it's really about letting the other guy do what he wants and say what he wants, even if you don't much like it and think he's wrong. That's the tricky part, the part that other cultures, and even some people here at home, sometimes can't swallow.
Freedom takes a certain amount of trust in your fellow man, which can be hard to come by in places like Iran. It also requires a humility about the limits of your own wisdom and a faith that in an open marketplace of ideas, the truth eventually will reveal itself.
Not surprisingly, those who claim to already know the truth don't cotton much to freedom. From their point of view, there's no need for debate and discussion to determine the best path; that path already has been chosen, usually by them. Nor is there any need to allow questions or challenge. Free speech just confuses the issue unnecessarily.
That revealed, unchallengeable truth is sometimes religious in nature, as in Iran; sometimes it is secular and ideological, as in the old Soviet Union; sometimes it is a truth supposedly embodied in a single leader, such as a king or dictator.
The primary insight of the Founding Fathers was to invest that wisdom in the people instead. It was a revolutionary concept 223 years ago, and it remains a threatening concept to many today. The wisdom of the people can at times be a wisdom reached slowly and slowly expressed; it can be a fragile wisdom, a wobbly wisdom that veers at times into foolishness before righting itself.
But over the long run, it is a true and legitimate wisdom, and we can take justified pride that for more than two centuries we have let that wisdom guide us.
It all began, of course, with the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," it stated.
Americans take justifiable pride in the way those words have echoed around the world and have been cited by freedom movements everywhere. But I worry that sometimes we try to take too much ownership for what is in fact a universal yearning. To the degree we link being pro-freedom to pro-American, we can undercut the cause we champion.
Those sensitivities were apparent this week in Iraq, which marked its own independence day, celebrating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from major cities in "National Sovereignty Day."
In a speech, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told his listeners that "the national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq."
According to The New York Times, Maliki "made no mention of the American military's involvement in fighting here for the last six years."
Other nations want the freedom that we Americans grant each other. But they want something else perhaps even more — they want the pride of being their own George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons. Freedom is like so many things in life — there's something sweet about feeling you earned it, rather than having it handed to you.
Jay Bookman is an Opinion columnist. He writes Tuesday and Friday. Reach him at jbookman.com.
