A Fourth of July Prayer

On July 4th, 2019, Emily and I took the kids and our then-au pair Matheus on Boat Day. We felt positive and free. The incredible summer day of sun and swim may have had a uniquely Greek flavor, but it also resembled the mood of a good Fourth of July at home.

“Happy Birthday, America!” Sennen yelled. “Happy Birthday, America!” Ailyn echoed while swimming in tourmaline blue waters of a cove of nearby Tiganakia island. They had tried yelling it from the boat, but we wouldn’t let them – so the open waters of the cove were their haven to celebrate America’s Independence.

Being in Greece, nothing felt as Fourth of July as hitting not one, but three beaches with swimming, watermelon, ouzo, wine and an outdoor lunch (although not barbecued). Emily and I did the same day-long boat excursion in 2010 when I felt elated to dive into water of a shade I had never seen before. After all, Greece and I share a passion for the color blue which is present nowhere in the world like it is here. Even the “average” sea water here its a rich hue of blue I have seen nowhere else. Emily and I noticed after our year of travel that if you look at an album or collage of Greece photos, blue simply jumps out at you.

America was already in the turmoil of the first Trump Administration, but it remained America and we were celebratory on July 4th – even from far away.

I’ve spent many a July 4th outside the country, but this one feels the most odd. It’s America’s 250th celebration and to me, things have never felt more disjointed, more frayed, less unified.

There are many professional columnists and guest contributors writing and talking about this phenomenon – and I’m not sure I have anything more insightful to offer. I’m just a guy with a laptop at a beach cafe on Patmos watching his kids and their friend pedal by on the little pedal-boat Andreas is letting them use for free because he likes them so much.

Nonetheless, I find myself sad and confused. I’m scared of the left. I’m scared of the right.

I’m scared of a Democratic Party dancing ever-more with a radical devil that among other things is anti-semitic, anti-family, anti-social norms and wants to portray America as in decay. It’s a left that often believes scaling back the economy is the way to solve environmental and social issues.

I’m scared of a Republican Party that has little resemblance to what it was before Trump. It has no principles. The Republican Party has become Trump followers, not the people who represent fiscal accountability, family values and growing a free-market economy. In fact, if you look carefully, you might notice Trump’s playbook often resembles FDR’s (protectionism, anti-immigration, anti-civil rights, deficit spending, stimulus money) more than it does Reagan or Bush’s (globalism, free-markets, free-trade, smaller government).

But what scares me most is how many people seem to be drinking one flavor of Kool-Aid or another.

We are a polarized country becoming even more polarized, destabilizing the world in the wake of our internal instability and seemingly happy to ride full-speed into the abyss.

For the first time, I was a little worried about how I might be perceived or received on Patmos this year in light of how the Iran War has driven up energy costs and contributed to inflation. I have been pleased to see people are able to distinguish the difference between the American government and the American people – or at least to figure I’m the nice guy they’ve known now for years. It seems silly in one sense, but people are fickle and the way they categorize others – the way they turn on others – can’t be underestimated.

When I was a kid, I had a pretty strong sense of what the United States was. It included being the best country on Earth, bearer of Freedom and Liberty – a country trying to live up to the ideals espoused in our founding documents. If we were imperfect, we were striving – and we were a better option than all the others. My grandparents – the children of immigrants who had grown up in the Depression and risked their lives fighting for our country – firmly believed this. There’s a video of my great-grandmother being interviewed about her life. Among all the amazing things in it, when asked what she wanted her descendants to know – the kids who would never get a chance to meet her – among her missives she said that “The United States is the best country in the world,” and to always respect it’s government and help it do the right thing.

I’m sure she could hardly have imagined a time like ours right now. We might still be the best country on Earth, but it no longer feels so emphatically clear – and there’s absolutely room to wonder if we will be in the future.

One of the most outstanding things for me recently was reading a column by Karl Rove – GW Bush’s closest advisor and Republican elections strategist – two days ago in the Wall Street Journal. He advocated against the concept of “Heritage Americans” being sold by JD Vance and much of the Trump establishment. Heritage Americans, as Vance defines them, are those who were already resident in the United States before the Civil War. They are the “real” Americans.

There goes my family. And most of my friends for that matter – even many of the solidly white Christian ones. Am I a second-tier American? As I think of the friends who stood by me when I got married, MAYBE one of them would be a Heritage American. My grandpa left two objects for me when he died: his backyard ashtray (my request – and he kindly cleaned it for me) and his Army ID card. He navigated bombers over Europe and brought back a piece of a fuselage pierced by bullets on the flight where the pilot was shot dead and my grandpa had to fly the plane back to base in the UK.

He’s a second class American?

I found myself agreeing completely with Karl Rove who pointed out how fundamentally flawed the idea of Heritage Americans is.

On the other hand, people like the Mayor of New York would happily recast Israel as an oppressive settler-colonial empire bent on genocide. I can’t support that narrative any more than one that would diminish my grandpa, or me, or almost everyone I love.

I was also perturbed today when I read that the President of the United States spoke at Mt Rushmore the day before America’s 250th birthday discussing the idea of exiling and deporting people. That’s his commemorative message? Not where we’re headed? No vision? No unity? Just we’ll round up and remove the people we deem an ideological threat? And he quickly and not-so-cleverly conflated communists with immigrants.

Any country whose big vision on a major anniversary is some version of “We’re going to take out the trash” doesn’t have a future.

And sure, we don’t want America to become Communist. We may not even want a lot of immigration – the United States has had periods of more and less immigration. We’ve even favored immigrants from certain countries over others. All of that is perfectly legitimate and inside the lines of moral and constitutional.

At the same time, there can be no second-tier Americans. And immigrants who have legally entered deserve a baseline of care and respect. They at least deserve not to be attacked ad-hominem.

My great-grandmother passed through Ellis Island. Who knows how many Passover seders she heard these words read from the Haggadah: “And a stranger shalt thou not oppress; for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

As a Jew – one whose great-grandparents all took the gigantic leap of faith leaving behind everything they knew – and in some cases, everyone they knew  – because the unknown had to be better than what they could see for themselves where they were – I struggle to accept a vision of America that no longer view immigrants as valuable people to assimilate and increase our greatness. And I’m revolted and scared at the idea of rooting out heretics and disposing of them.

To paraphrase the Haggadah in a modern context, a minority who has known persecution can ill afford to ignore the treatment of any other minority. Once it begins, there’s no logical or reliable place for it to end.

This 4th of July, I don’t feel as carefree or optimistic as I did at Tiganakia in 2019. However, I can remain hopeful. I hope that hundreds of years of immigrants assimilating have formed a culture as resilient as my great-grandmother and my grandfather themselves. A culture that remembers that at one point, the only Heritage Americans were Native Americans. We have all been the stranger. Ideally, none of us will be Communists, or haters, or bigots of any kind.

Maybe we’ll remember that mid-century bipartisanism helped make our country great. It was never the fringe, but the middle that made us what we are. May God bring us a unifier so we not only have celebrations at 300, 500 and maybe even 1,000 years but that wherever we find ourselves, we are moving further down the path and staying true to the ideals the Founders left to us.