The Fourth of July is always a mental battle for me. I'm proud to be American in the sense of recognizing the uniqueness of the experiment in self-government, but when it comes to the pomp and circumstance, I just haven't been able to get with it since fireworks stopped making me gasp. (Anyone planning to use this post to "Michelle" me in the future should I decide to run for office should stop reading here.)

Any student of African-American history or anyone with an American history teacher worth his or her certification may recall Frederick Douglass' epic address on July 5, 1852, "What, to an American Slave, is Your 4th of July?" His answer: "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." In the eyes of the slave, he argued, this celebration of the equality of all mankind and liberty from tyranny was a "sham" and an "unholy license." Of course, he was dead on.

One hundred fifty-six years later to the day of Douglass' speech, I watched two black American women (sisters in every sense of the word) compete against each other in the finals of the world's oldest tennis championship. That occurrence is a sign of major progress in itself, but the fact that I watched it in my own residence and not from slave quarters is a quantum leap from the world Douglass viewed then.

But even with signs of progress and 'how far we've come' abounding, I struggle to grasp my feelings about Independence Day and what it means for where we are as a country today considering our past and signs for our future.

What would the country be today if Thomas Jefferson, the quintessential embodiment of American-ness in his achievements and contradictions, had succeeded in convincing the other delegates to include this paragraph from his first draft of the Declaration of Independence into the final version of charges against King George III?

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people for whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."

Would confronting the country's deepest character flaws before they became bloodthirsty beasts have led us to an alternative reality from what we face today? The racial elements of the Founders' hypocrisy are obvious, but what strikes me most bluntly is the sheer selfishness and lack of foresight that seems to have seeped into their hearts and minds like an invisible, poisonous gas. (I can hear the conversations now, "Yes, all men are created equal...but some men are created to build profitable industries for other men while those men drink lemonade and watch. Surely you understand, Thomas!") Two hundred thirty-two years later, that poison has spread and worsened among us all, regardless of color, as we celebrate our independence via gluttony amid a world food crisis and paranoia masked as national pride.

We can't last much longer like this. The glow of what journalist Fareed Zakaria calls "the post-American world" is looming steadily at the horizon, and while we pig out, the 6.3 billion "other" people on the globe are likely watching the baby empire cannibalize itself and figuring out their own ways of moving on without us.

Zakaria argues that America can still be a leader in this 'new world,' and I agree, but this can't happen without a gut check and a radical shift in priorities. The Founders themselves believed in a government's capacity to be overhauled and reinvented if the public's eyes were open and if they were empowered with tools for change, so I suppose that's something to be proud of. But if I don't take that pride any further than lip service, though, I'm useless.

Okay, I know all of this is a bitter pill for a Monday after a holiday, but maybe I wasn't the only person feeling a bit 'off' on the holiday. Maybe other people are hungry for a new role for the country, too. Maybe a new movement is bubbling beneath the surface and new leadership will emerge to give the American bus a good push out of the ditch. (Sidenote for those in the Obamanon: you are only useful if you will still say 'Yes We Can' and be driven by hope if Barack doesn't win or will be prepared to actually work to create that 'Change We Can Believe In' if he does.)

For now though, I need to finish my leftovers. The chicken was particularly good this year.

Jimi Hendrix, "The Star Spangled Banner" (1969)

Photo: Funkadelic, "America Eats Its Young" (1972)