Fourth of July

You can put this one under the 'selfish introspection' tab I think. Concepts of country, sovereignty, and patriotism always seemed strange to me. America is where I live, where I am, but I know it didn't HAVE to be. Nobody controls where they are born, and to a smaller degree what nationality they get to have legally. If you want to be technical, and I usually am, my parents made these decisions for me. So were they really sewn out of the whole cloth of the state? No, because they had no control over where they were born. The fact you are even here is totally random circumstance, forget the impossibility of existence at all, so how do we own this land, the flag that signifies it or have pride at the calendar date of July the 4th?

You can't point to the Earth and say you own it anymore than you can point to Utah and say you own it, but people do. Our government does it, and they have all the weaponry and clout to make sure that it is true against the entire world community's aggression. No one is taking Utah from the USA, count on that. So where can you really understand this? Where does this 'ownership' come from? Our founding fathers said it was god, and that's about the best answer you are going to get from anyone on the subject. You can possibly make arguments that we have been here a long time, built all this stuff, grown a massive population, tilled, planted and machined the land over hundreds of years and therefore we can claim it. After all we were the ones to have put in the most effort, right? This concept falls apart when you see that any town government in the country is not going to just give you vacant public land, even a tiny quarter acre, just because you've planted tomatoes and built a shed on it. You'll be lucky if you don't end up in court over it honestly.

Going back to god giving George Washington the deed to North America, this one is undone even more easily when you ask the native Americans what god they worship. Clearly they were not passing the plate on Sundays PLUS having been living on this land thousands of years ahead of our great migration from Europe they have grounds for ownership in the previous argument anyway. So what the heck, right? Independence Day... from what? England was formed from the Germanic tribes, who knacked it from the suddenly defunct Roman Empire, who stole it from the celts who supplanted the legendary picts and dannans, who stole it from the freaking formors. So we're a concept based in circular logic that won independence from the metaphors of a different concept.

It's all people, people! It was what people have decided over the ages, through war, law and simple convenience. This dirt has no flags on it, leaving us essentially no better than the tribes of protohumans who have predated us by millenia. These are just bigger tribes. Our concept of nationality is formed from the continental landscape, and our external needs and the outward pressures we exert are decided by the resources at home in those landscapes, but that does not make them ours. Politics and diplomacy and all the international law you can shake a stick at is a reaction to the horrors of war. Avoiding war is the aim in that case. The necessity for it's creation does not come from the flag, our "American Values" or any god given right. Here in our homeland America values itself, and we are not unique in those sort of sentiments.

I think that when people assume America is forever they are really missing the point. We are a young county in the global community, a fantastic empire of wealth and ideas. Whatever we did to get here, good or bad, we are here now. It was not given to us, but we fashioned it out of practically nothing. However saying that we own the land is crazy, because someday there is going to be America in space, as in football and Burger King in space. In that future we will hopefully understand that you can't own your mother.