Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.

This year that kind of celebration is particularly difficult when many of us are deeply upset as we watch our government escalating its policy of drones, still fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan, running elections in which only the super-rich or their allies stand a chance of being taken seriously by the corporate media, watching as the distance between rich and poor becomes ever wider, while education and social programs for the poor get defunded, the Supreme Court reaffirms the right of corporations to on donate without limit to political campaigns, the envirionment reaches beyond the tipping point and nobody even bothers to pretend that they are going to do something to epair the ecological crisis, and the government passes legislation that in effect does away with habaeus corpus and the right of people to a trial by their peers (by legislating life imprisonment without trial for anyone the government suspects of being a foreign operative, including US citizens), and disspirited by the lack of vision of the Democratic Party, and the dis-unity and nit-picking on the Left which seems to only know what it is against but has not yet developed a coherent vision of what it is for!  Oy.

That's why we've developed a July 4th celebratory program that you can draw from ... to create for yourself and your friends and/or family a celebration that will have meaning to you. We wish to affirm what is good in America without ignoring its problems, and to affirm a vision of hope that transcends this moment in 2012 and its disappointments. And we can even celebrate that some people who didn't have medical coverage will now, after the Supreme Court decision last week to allow the Obamacare plan to be implented, and before the Republicans find a way to eviscerate it, have that coverage--a concrete step towards "The Caring Society--Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Planet" that is the goal of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (which is also welcoming to atheists and agnostics and anyone else who wants a world based on love and generosity).

We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that avoiding July 4 or turning it into nothing more than a picnic with friends is a mistake for progressives. There is much worth celebrating in American history that deserves attention on July 4th, despite the current depravity of those who lead this country, though the celebration-worthy aspects of our society are rarely the focus of the public events.

We also acknowledge that in the twenty-first century there is a pressing need to develop a new kind of consciousness — a recognition of the interdependence of everyone on the planet. A new revolution is necessary — one in which our actions reflect a realization that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and of the planet itself. ...

This is the equivalent of a Passover Haggadah, the guide to doing a Passover Seder, only designed for an interfaith and secular humanist community like the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Please feel free to use any part of it or all of it--but also please urge your friends and family to join our Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org so we can afford to keep doing this kind of work!!!

Guide to a Communal or Family Celebration of July 4 Inter-Dependence Day

Celebrating What Is Good about the United States of America

(Go around your picnic table, or your July 4th gathering and have each person read a paragraph until everyone has been able to do so, and then repeat that process till you've read aloud through this whole thing. Feel free to cut, add, or in other ways change this approach.

Today hundreds of millions of Americans will celebrate all that is good in the history of the United States of America. Even though we know there is much to criticize about America (including the use of the word “America” as synonymous with the United States, thereby ignoring Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America) there is also much to celebrate.

Today we mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that still inspires many Americans today. We’re going to read the declaration aloud. As we do, listen for those ideas that you find inspiring or resonant or in some other way pertinent for our lives in twenty-first-century America.

Unfortunately, the high ideals expressed in the Declaration, “that all men are created equal and endowed with their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were not actually put into practice when the Constitution was created and the United States came into existence. The word “men” was applied not in a general sense to include women, but rather to only include men. And, in fact, for the first decades of our country, the only people who could vote were white men who owned property. Worse, slavery was permitted and African Americans were counted as 3/5 of a European American in the census, which determined how many people lived in a given area who deserved representation in the Congress. Native Americans — those who had survived the near genocide of European settlement — did not figure at all in these equations.

Some of these distortions got rectified through the democratic process that had been set up by the founders of our country. History books focus on the people who were in power as if all change comes from those in positions of authority. The truth is, though, that much of what we love about America was created by ordinary citizens. Often they encountered resistance from those in power; sometimes they found allies in power who joined in the struggle.

At this celebration, let’s give thanks for the ordinary and extraordinary Americans whose struggles brought about those changes. As I read each of the following, let’s enjoy a bite of food, raising our forks each time in celebration of their achievements!

To the waves of immigrants from all parts of the world who struggled to accept each other and find a place in this country.

To the escaped slaves and their allies — particularly Quakers, evangelical Christians, and freedom-loving secularists — who built the underground railroad and helped countless people to freedom.

To the coalitions of religious and secular people — women and men, black and white — who built popular support for the emancipation of the slaves.

To the African Americans and allies who went to prison, lost their livelihoods, and were savagely beaten in the struggle for civil rights.

To the working people who championed protections like the eight-hour day, minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and the right to organize, often at great personal cost to them.

To the immigrants who fought against “nativist” tendencies and refused to close the borders of this country to new groups of immigrants, and who continue to support a policy of “welcoming the stranger” just as this country opened its gates to their ancestors when they were the immigrants and strangers, and to all who fight for the safety and decent treatment of immigrants.

To the women who risked family, job security, and their own constructed identities to shift our collective consciousness about men and women and raise awareness of the effects of patriarchy.

To all of those who risk scorn and violence and often lose their families to lead the struggle against homophobia and for the acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer people.

To those who continue to work for equal access for people with disabilities.

To those who advocate for sensitivity to animals and to the earth itself.

To all of the innovators and artists who have brought so much beauty and usefulness into our lives.

To those who fought to extend democratic principles not only in politics but also in the workplace and in the economy.

To those who developed innovations in science and technology, in literature and art, in music and dance, in film and in computer science, in medical and communication technologies, and in methods to protect ourselves from the destructive impacts of some of these new technologies.

To those who developed psychological insights and increased our ability to be sensitive to our impact on others.

To those who developed ecological awareness.

To those who brought the insights of their own particular religious or spiritual traditions that emphasized love and caring for others and generosity toward those who had been impoverished and sought to turn those ideas not only into a call for personal charity but also into a mission to transform our economic and political systems in ways that would reflect those values.

To those who fought for peace and nonviolence, and who helped stop many wars.

All of that we celebrate in America involved hard-won struggles to overcome entrenched ways of thinking. Adding to the difficulty of the struggle were the struggles among groups of people working for liberation. Sometimes people in oppressed groups would say, “My suffering is more intense or more important than your suffering” to each other, undermining rather than building solidarity.

Sometimes one oppressed group was used by the people with power to fight against another oppressed group. Some people in each previously oppressed group would seize their hard-won power and turn their backs on the needs of others, even discriminating against or looking down on others whose struggles had not yet been won. It was sad and shocking when people struggling for peace found that some of their allies were racist or sexist or homophobic or anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic or anti-Christian or held hateful views about all religious people or about all secular people or about all white people or about all men. Sometimes that would lead people to give up. Luckily, many others did not give up, and so the struggles for human freedom dignity, human rights, economic security, and civil liberties were not abandoned.

Those struggles continue today, and it could easily take many more decades before they are fully realized.

But the good news is that many people have retained their basic decency and caring for others. We are surrounded by people who care. True, it’s often hard to show that. When first approached, many people express indifference to the well-being of others.

Our economic system encourages selfishness, me-first-ism, “looking out for number one,” and indifference to the ecological and ethical impacts of our activities, and acting counter to those attitudes feels not only unfamiliar but also risky.

Yet underneath all that, most people yearn for a different kind of world, but they think it is “unrealistic” to struggle for what they really believe in, since they are convinced that nobody else shares that desire with them. They momentarily overcame that fear in 2008 by giving a strong majority vote for Obama — allowing themselves to believe that a Democrat who promised “change we can believe in” and told people “yes, we can [build a very different kind of world]” could himself make the difference. What we’ve learned subsequently is that no candidate within this current system is likely to stick to any transformative goals in the face of overwhelming corporate power and the power of the corporate-subservient media unless we can build a powerful movement of us ordinary people to change our system.

This is part of the reason we’ve created a Network of Spiritual Progressives to support each other in building a world that really does reflect our highest values. If peace, social justice, ecological sensitivity, full implementation of human rights, and the creation of a society based on love is “unrealistic,” then we say “screw realism.” Being realistic in a deeper sense is not accepting “reality” as it is presently presented to us.

We want a different kind of world, and we have to engage in nonviolent struggles to build it. And that has always been the way we have won the battles for precisely the things that make us proud of the victories of the American people: it was always people who were told that what they wanted was “unrealistic” and who essentially said “screw realism — we’re going to fight for what is right” who became the real heroes of the American story. Of course, the powerful often obscure that history, and teach us to think that all the human rights and liberties and freedoms were “given to us,” but actually it was precisely the little people like us who made the big changes that have made this country worthy of celebration.  ...

,Shalom, Michael Lerner