A Declaration

Thoughts on the 4th of July in exile

Jul 04, 2025

I was in the 9th grade on 9/11. I remember having recurring nightmares for weeks of bodies falling from the sky. At the first varsity football game following 9/11, somebody handed out plastic American flags to the entire crowd. Midway through the 3rd quarter, with our team handily beating the visitors and the bleachers thinning out, the stadium floors were covered in discarded flags, mixing with the empty cartons of popcorn and soda. A friend of mine soberly picked up most of the flags from the student section until he had two fists full. And then, not knowing what to do with them, gingerly placed them in a trash can under the bleachers.

I celebrated my twenty-first 4th of July in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was studying abroad with an American cohort at Cambridge, and we spent that weekend shivering in the wet, windy Scottish summer. Our British teaching assistants prepared us a 4th of July barbecue with some of the worst hot dogs I’ve ever eaten. It was amusing and a little bit embarrassing. This was the closing of the Bush presidency, and most of us that summer instinctively shied away from our American roots in shame.

On my honeymoon ten years later, my wife and I enrolled in a wonderful cooking class that took place on a rooftop in Rome in the autumn sunshine. We were the only Americans; a Danish mother and daughter joined us, as well as and a young Swiss woman originally from Turkey. Over the course of the afternoon, with wine loosening us up, the conversation meandered towards politics. My wife and I reflexively apologized for Trump, with a “we’re-the-good-Americans” smirk and joke. Nobody really laughed. The Swiss woman told us all about the horrors happening in her native Turkey under Erdogan. Her family lived in constant fear. It was a sobering talk. She was visiting Rome all by herself. Nearly a decade later, I still kick myself for not inviting her to dinner with us that night.

I’m writing this on my thirty-eighth 4th of July, this time from Wellington, New Zealand. It’s mid-winter here; the weather is damp and cold. We can normally see downtown from our hilltop rental, but last night the lights went out. It took me a moment to realize that a thick fog had enshrouded the entire city in blackness. Today, our daughter’s preschool celebrated the 4th of July for the two or three American kids. My wife was mortified, but compromised by sending our daughter in red and white underneath a sky blue peace sign t-shirt.

I thought being out of America would make the cruelty and stupidity of Trumpism easier to bear, but it’s had the opposite effect on me. I watch with horror, and some survivor’s guilt, ten thousand miles away. The Kiwis keep joking with me, “you got out in the nick of time,” but I don’t feel that way. I feel just as despairing as if I were on American soil.

During my lifetime, I’ve watched us quietly cede America’s meaning and future to the far right. The American flag itself has been co-opted as a far right symbol. We’ve allowed patriotism to be defined by extremists who wish to tear the country apart. I’ve exiled my own patriotism, and I’m not comfortable with that anymore. Shame is not an animating force. We need a cleaner, more robust source of fuel if we want to reshape America into something positive.

The America of 4th of July parades is a narrow vision: it is politicians, soldiers, wars, and almost exclusively white men. But America is much bigger than its political history. In most of the foreign countries I’ve been to, I’ve noticed a richer civic sphere: currency bears the likenesses of painters, not just elected officials; streets are named after poets, not just rich people; statues honor musicians, not just generals.

It’s in this spirit that I choose to celebrate the 4th of July, to celebrate Americans who fight on the moral and spiritual battlefields. The America of Thoreau, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson. The America of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Twain. The America of James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong. The America of Bob Dylan, Black Flag, Phillip Guston, Ben Shahn, Los Lobos. An America that can contain Willie, Waylon, Cash, and Vonnegut, Richard Wright, Mary Oliver. Nina Simone and Bill Knott and Kara Walker and Alice Neel and John Coltrane. D. Boon and Mike Watt and Miller Williams and A Tribe Called Quest and Jeff Tweedy and Rebecca Solnit. The untold anonymous Americans who labor as activists, artists, nurses, teachers, parents, and so much more, who live lives of decency and don’t get any fireworks. The America of my Jewish grandfather, who as a surgeon in Patton’s army in North Africa and Italy saved the lives of Americans, but also Germans and Italians, his own enemies, because they suffered and needed help.

I celebrate this America without looking away from the reality of America. We must make our own America. We must make our own flag.