Thursday is the day we in the US celebrate our independence from Great Britain. The date itself is somewhat odd. John Adams, who died July 4 1826, on the 50th Anniversary of Independence Day (within hours of his friend and political nemesis Thomas Jefferson), always believed that July 2 was the proper date, that being the day debate on the Declaration of Independence concluded. And the political event of declaring independence in 1776 was not fulfilled on the battlefield for many hard, dangerous years after. But nevermind all that. Tomorrow is the birthday of my birthplace.

I find it very difficult to express just how I feel about this country. People who know me well know how much I love my country, but I think most would be surprised to know just how choked up I can get during the Nationa Anthem at a ballgame, or how near to tears I come every time I hear America the Beautiful. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address positively makes me cry, for the perfect encapsulation of the American ideal.

What makes it hard to express is that my love is unconditional. Not, "my country, right or wrong"--but for all its faults my country is after all mine. The people who look at all the bad things the US has done and conclude that the US is the worst thing ever to happen to the world have not looked very closely at any of the other countries. Or, more likely they have, and they resent, in spite of some truly hideous stains on our honor, that we have managed to rise above the worst things we have ever done, to do some great things too. They are the sort who run around, declaring "I'm as good as you!" when what they want you to understand is you are as bad as they.

The sly snickering in Europe and Asia whenever an American talks of good and evil is all the proof that those nations--or at least their leaders and intellectuals--are most definitely not as good as we. The fact that the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world still thinks about and honestly believes in objective Good and objective Evil, while the inventors of Dachau and Auschwitz, the murderers of kulaks and Falun Gong, mock and sneer and in gleeful moral torpor gives the lie to their smug disdain.

This country has flaws surely, even still. We carry a big stick, but we are not always careful about where we wave it, or how softly we speak. We worry too much about money, and we are too apt to believe that other people are just like us. We are the most successful multi-racial society ever, and yet we are obsessed with "race." We are inconstant, and often tempted by our older brothers' moral lethargy.

But as Eugene McCarthy noted, we can choke on a gnat, but we swallow tigers whole.

This nation enslaved hundreds of thousands of blacks, stolen from their homes and given over to a horrific life and death. But then we sacrificed hundreds of thousands of young free men's lives to free a people that no one else in the world cared about: not the blacks in Africa who captured and sold them, not the slave traders who transported them, and certainly not the people who 75 years later were putting their neighbors onto trains bound for gas chambers so they could steal their art and live in their houses.

And so, Gentle Reader, I conclude. If you live here, fly your flag proudly this July 4th. If you are not American, please come visit us, and so discover that much of what you have read about us is true, and even more false. We are a kind and generous people, rougher, less refined than our European cousins, egotistical and paradoxically humble. If you visit us with an open mind, you will surely leave with an open heart.

God bless you, and God bless America.