The Irony Of Independence Day

Somerset County’s fireworks got postponed to 17 July. The National Weather Service was calling for a heat index over 38°C (100°F) today, so the county pushed the show back rather than risk anyone at North Branch Park keeling over for the sake of a good sparkler display. Sensible. I’d already missed Montgomery Township’s own show, back on 25 June, for reasons that had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with just not being there.

So no actual “bombs bursting in air” tonight. Just me, indoors, thinking about what today is supposed to be about while choosing which of my fireworks photos to attach.

The story goes: brave men fought a war against a king so that ordinary people could govern themselves. Freedom fighters. Independence. All of that.

Here’s the thing that’s been nagging at me. Juneteenth was last month. That holiday only exists because “all men are created equal” took a war to actually mean it. Ninety years later. Not a metaphorical war. An actual one, with actual casualties, over whether the promise made in 1776 applied to everyone or just some people standing in the right rooms.

That’s not a new observation. Doesn’t need to be. But it’s worth sitting with on the one night a year designed to make you feel unambiguously good about the founding.

Because the more I read about how the electoral system actually got built, the less it looks like an oversight that took ninety years and a war to correct, and the more it looks like the system working roughly as intended. I want to be careful here. I’m not a historian, and there’s real disagreement on this. But there’s a serious argument that the Founders, having just thrown off one aristocracy, weren’t in a rush to build a functioning democracy in its place.

The Electoral College. The Senate as originally set up. Property qualifications on voting that lasted well into the 1800s. Filters. And if the system was built to filter who got a say, then Juneteenth isn’t really the story of America finally living up to its founding promise. It’s the story of people fighting their way into a system that was never built to include them, and paying for it in blood because there was no other route in.

Which is roughly where I keep landing on sortition, the idea I’ve been circling for a few weeks now — choosing representatives by lottery, jury-duty style, instead of by campaign. Not because I think it fixes 1776 or 1863 retroactively. It doesn’t. But because the whole appeal of it is that it doesn’t rely on anyone being let in. There’s no filter to fight your way past. You’re just… selected, same as anyone else, mechanic or nurse or teacher, no fundraising required and no gatekeeper deciding whether your kind of person gets a seat this century.

I don’t know if that’s actually better. I’ve said before I’m not settled on it. But tonight, with no fireworks and an extra two weeks to think about it, the irony’s hard to avoid. We celebrate the day the promise was made. We got a second holiday, generations later, marking the day part of the country was finally forced to keep it. And the system that made both of those things necessary is still, largely, the same one we’re using now.

Fireworks on the 17th. I might go. I might enjoy them, probably without thinking about any of this at all. That’s sort of the point, and also sort of the problem.