… although this year, my lament may be a bit farther out of the mainstream.
I continue to resent celebrating giving the King the finger instead of the actual accomplishment of the Constitution. It's even more of a problem given that July 4 isn't when it was signed in any event. But since our inability to impose our manifest destiny on the rest of the world was brought to the forefront in the early 1970s, between Vietnam and OPEC, this nation has trended more and more toward jingoistic declarations in ringing prose that neglect others' interests (legitimate or otherwise) and egregiously ignore the difficulty of making a good-sounding deal work, in practice, when it confronts the enemy. Or even just reality.
It's understandable, I suppose. It's always easier to celebrate a single anticipatory event than to anticipate the hard work coming afterward. But it's not laudable.