Tag National Independence Days

Happy Summer

Michael 10 Comments

Happy July everybody! We’re heading into our first full month of summer, and it’s hot hot hot, and on fire with summer fun celebrations! I’d like to take the time revisit and few topics I previously revisit on a variety of Fourths of July. I hope you’ll take the time to read or reread them and if you do, that you enjoy reading or rereading them as much as I did when I wrote or rewrote them.  

Up north it’s Canada Day today. South of most of the Great Lakes in will be Independence Day on Thursday. Neither day is exactly when new countries were constituted and truly became independent. Nor did that happen in France on July 14. But they are all momentous dates in the formation of countries we still recognize and celebrate today. Throughout the world, 21 other countries took their first steps to freedom and self-control in various Julys. I wrote more on those eventful events in 2017. You can check it out here.

Here in my neck of the woods we do fireworks in a big way. But we seem to be slacking off on parades. Fireworks are nice but parades, especially the marching bands, get my heart pumping. I think it’s because to me, bands are microcosms of America. I felt that way strongly enough that naturally I wrote about it. In fact, I’ve felt so strongly that I have repeated the same post a few times. The most recent was just last year and you can find that here.

On the Fourth of July 2022 we were pretty comfortably making that return to “normal” that we knew we’d get to eventually. That day I re-visited a post I wrote in July 2020 when we were just starting to find our way out of lockdowns and venturing back out on summer vacations, but not by air or by sea, but by land. That reminded me of my childhood vacations, always by car, and someone always stuck in the middle of the back seat, suffering from Middle Seat Hump Syndrome.

I hope sometime this month, wherever you are you can celebrate, travel, ooh and aah at the pyrotechnics, or march on to your personal independence. And between all that, I hope you have some time to read, or reread these older summer offerings from me.

Happy July everybody!

Who we are depends on many external factors, but what we are is all us. We look at how we tell ourselves what we want to be as we live life in the latest Uplift!

Happy Birthday America!

 

Happy [fill in the blank] Independence Day

Michael 3 Comments

Boy: Grandpa, did they have the fourth of July in Italy when you were growing up?

Old Man: Yes. In fact, they did. They have the fourth of July everywhere!

Ok, it’s an old joke. But actually, they do have a fourth of July, or more accurately a Fourth of July, or most accurately an Independence Day everywhere. No matter where Flagyou are reading this, sometime in the past, sometimes a quite distant past where you are isn’t what it used to be. Every nation on Earth at some time wasn’t. And a surprising number of when they became what they are happened in July.

There is our American Independence Day tomorrow on that at least here famous Fourth of July, commemorating when we told the English Crown that we would rather suffer through a couple hundred years of taxation with poor representation than another day of it without any representation.  The actual independence came five years, three months, and 15 days later when the British forces officially surrendered. All those Americans reading this, you knew that, right?

A couple of days ago, July 1 actually, our neighbors to the north celebrated Canada Day.When I was going to school it was known as Dominion Day (and probably was to a lot of Canadians back then also) and we were told it was the Canadian IndependenceFlags Day. What did we know? We’re Americans. I later learned that it actually commemorated the combining of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario into the Dominion of Canada, presenting a stronger unified border against the United States just in case the politicos in Washington having just reunited the states after the American Civil War might have designs on taking those Canadian provinces for their own. Our own. Somebody’s own. I found that out when the British Parliament declared Canada to be an independent nation 115 years later.

Another thing I learned in my American schooling was that July 14 was France’s Independence Day on what we were told they call Bastille Day. And in fact July 14 does commemorate the storming of the Bastille and the uniting of the French people against the monarchy in 1789. The French Republic was actually established on September 22, 1792 which like our October 19, 1781 doesn’t seem to be celebrated. Now you could say that all that isn’t really independence as much as a changing of the guard. For the real French Independence you have to go back to 481, give or take a couple of years, when the Kingdom of the Franks was founded by Clovis I with land taken from the Roman Empire.

WorldWhatever misconceptions I had of these days they were still momentous days in the formation of what nations share our terrestrial home today. But there are a lot more nations celebrating freedom this month. Twenty-one other nations from Algeria to Venezuela. (I was hoping when I did my research that I find Zimbabwe gained their independence from Great Britain in July but alas, it was actually on April 18.  But it would have made such a great sentence!)

So wherever you are, chances are pretty good that you or a nearby neighbor is celebrating something this month that made somewhere literally somewhere.

Happy Blank of July!