Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Barbecues

On my doorstep a few months ago was a small wicker basket lined with paper grass, upon which lay four colored eggs, a few psychedelic jelly beans and a foil-covered chocolate bunny. As a child, I always loved Easter – hunting in bushes for candy, dyeing eggs, hugging new stuffed rabbits – but the connection between these traditions and the resurrection of Christ always evaded me. Historians say that the painting and rolling of eggs and the purchase of new bonnets and dresses to wear to church is customary. But what’s with the jelly beans and bunnies? My five-year-old neighbor, the donor of the colorful basket, explains: “Easter is when the Easter bunny hides candy in Mariners Park for kids. Don’t you know anything?” 

Clearly, holidays have lost their meaning. Somewhere along the line, piety and patriotism have given way to a good excuse for a picnic. Take Memorial Day, for example. At the end of May, I asked a smattering of people, ranging in ages 15-50, what that day signified to them. Their answers: “A long weekend.” “The beginning of summer.” “A day for the president to get heckled.” No one mentioned it was a day to decorate the graves of the war dead. Of course they claimed to know this was the purpose of the holiday. It just represented something else to each of them, something that had to do with parks and beaches and a day off from work or school.

Now, with the Fourth of July here, picnics and barbecues and fireworks are on the menu and I wonder how many revelers know, or more specifically, care, that this holiday commemorated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The – When in the course of human events… we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – Declaration of Independence. The one signed July 4, 1776 by the real John Hancock and 55 other representatives of the 13 United States of America.

Unfortunately, the answer is: not many. I’ve asked 60 people from Laguna Beach to Costa Mesa to Long Beach if they knew what the Declaration of Independence was, could they recite the first line and could they name a few of the men who wrote it. Only one person could answer all these questions: 30-year-old Andrew Almata, a waiter at a local seafood restaurant, who also knew obscure facts, such as why William Tell really shot the apple off his son’s head with a bow and arrow (penalty for taking off his hat).

Of the rest I asked, 52 people thought the Declaration began with: “We the people…“ Three said: “Four score and seven years ago…” Six people named Thomas Jefferson as an author, and only two people could name another. Most seemed to know it was Great Britain we were declaring our independence from. And all said that what the Fourth of July really meant to them was a time for fireworks and barbecues and that freedom and equality never crossed their minds.

Certainly, this is a nationwide phenomenon. On July 4, 1951, a reporter for a Madison, Wisconsin newspaper was rebuffed by 99 out of 100 people he asked to sign a petition made up of quotations from both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Unrecognized, many called the petition subversive, some called it The Communist Manifesto.

Is it the run-on sentences that make this very important document so difficult to remember? Is it the fact that these days, it seems all men are really not created equal? Is it that we have taken our freedom for granted? Is it that we learned this information in grade school and have not retained it? The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most important document ever written. It is what makes America, America. It is what gives us the right to elect our government and to change it when we don’t think our needs are being met. It is what protects us from tyranny.

More of us need to think about that when the barbecues are lit and the burgers are cooking and artfully choreographed pyrotechnics burst over the Orange County coast. The sky will be spangled with color and light because we are free. We can spit watermelon seeds into the grass and parade down the streets because we are free.