Dependence Day 2023
Each year, we celebrate our national holiday. It’s called Dependence Day, though we typically refer to it as its arbitrary calendar date: “the 4th of July.”
“Happy 4th!” we pronounce to one another. “Happy 4th to you, too!”
It’s a more subtle and polite way of expressing that we love our government. If we truly can’t contain ourselves, we’ll wave flags and smile at each other.
On this great day, food is eaten and drinks are drunk. It’s important to remember that we depend for these not on the farmer or the brewer, but on the state who regulates them. Under that guidance, we revel with friends and family, outdoors in the long summer evenings. We know that the more administrative agencies we have in place, the more beautiful are the sunsets.
And when the administered sun sets, fireworks are launched into the night sky, though these displays are becoming less common. Safety considerations—the chance of a fire or an injured observer—must outweigh the pyrotechnic spectacle. Many towns take Dependence Day so seriously that they make fireworks entirely illegal. We appreciate these mandatory suggestions.
Where Halloween celebrates creepy monsters, and Labor Day celebrates people not laboring, Dependence Day stands for something greater: the principle of dependence; the notion that each of us exists at the behest and pleasure of those who wisely rule us.
Appropriately, this ritual of state-worship is our national holiday, wrapped everywhere in red, white, and blue; in the colors and symbolism of patriotism, of allegiance, of dependence. The National Anthem is sung at every public event and we put our hands on our hearts to symbolize state-ownership of our bodies. Veterans are honored and war is remembered, not to avoid it in the future, but to embolden us for the next one.
The bald eagle, perhaps our most muscular symbol of national power, keeps its eyes on us. We depend on this surveillance and support its continual expansion. On this great day of dependence, multi-million dollar machines of war fly in formation across the skies, cheered on with thunderous applause amidst a great deal of pride. We depend on these shows of strength to prevent us from knowing we aren’t.
Hot dogs are eaten, but only those approved by the Food and Safety Administration and this is why we’re healthy, for we depend on them to know what to eat. Beer is bought, but only from licensed stores requiring state-issued ID. We depend on this identification to know who we are. Of course, it’s illegal to drink this beer outside in many places, and we depend on such laws to tell us where celebration is acceptable.
Indeed, we can be most proud that all Dependence Day celebrations are compliant with applicable laws. Evidence of rebellion is entirely absent from the festivities, emblematic of our servitude.
In less civilized times, our adolescent nation celebrated “freedom.” Now grown up, we celebrate fealty. Taxes were wrongly seen as oppressive, whereas we now know our work belongs not to us, but to those who take it from us. Science has told us that man is nothing without the apparatus of state placed appropriately above, a firm rope looped around his neck to help him hold his head high.
Friends, on this and every Dependence Day, remind yourself of all that you can’t do without strangers making you do it.
From this, society is unified in subservience.
For this, we are grateful.
On this, we depend.