In honor of the holiday I'm drinking some British tea.

Happy birthday, America, you magnificent bastard. It's been not a bad year for you. There's been better, but there's been worse.

This year saw your economy collapse, which surprised far, far more people than it should have. A cynic could say it was just desserts for your unquenchable thirst for more, and that it was purely your fault. That cynic may be right, but the more gentle soul will argue that lots of people who had the least lost the most, and had no role in creating the disaster. The cynic may respond that that's certainly not the first time your poor bore the greatest burden for a problem they did not create, and again, the cynic may be right. The gentle soul can only hope that you'll finally begin to learn from it.

This year saw the tail end of a presidential election, one that brought lots of contentious and sometimes ugly issues to the forefront, one that saw record voter turnout and - quite improbably - a black man elected as president. For perspective, the White House where he now lives and works was built in the late 1700s primarily by black slaves and a few months before Mr. Obama was born, a number of people were severely beaten for suggesting that different races didn't need different buses. So that's some pretty good progress.

Meanwhile we've had a bit of back-and-forth on the issue of equal rights for gays and lesbians. Some states have taken monumental steps in granting those equal rights; others have gone in the exact opposite direction. It was only a few years ago that it was ruled that consenting adults can have whatever type of sex they want with each other, though, so the issue is still young.

So the year's been a mixed bag. There's been some great things - oh, did I mention that the Phillies won the world series? God bless baseball - and some not so great things. The nation has not collapsed, we're beginning to withdraw from one of our messes of a war, and even thought many things are bad, there's still that curiously American sense of 'Yeah, but we'll get through it.' Because this is a country born of the most improbably circumstances, a band of ragtag idealists and extremists who decided to poke their huge, hulking overlord in the eye - and then keep poking, and eventually escape his grasp. This is the nation which, after building it's capital on the backs of slaves, elected a black man president. This is the nation that learned that drafting people into military service to fight preemptive was is a bad idea, but hasn't yet learned how not to start needless wars. It's the country that loves sports, but went ahead and invented it's own damn games.

Today I'm going to listen to a ball game, go to a barbecue, drink some beer, and of course engage in that all-American pasttime of blowing things up in the sky. Why? Because 233 years ago, in my hometown of Philadelphia, a bunch of mad geniuses sweated out the hot summer and came to the conclusion that what the English parliament was doing was wrong, and those men had the responsibility, as people, to put a stop to it. So they, with their large but wholly uncoordinated and untrained militias, went to it, and fought, and many of them died, but in the end the right side won.

Keep on keepin' on, America.

(I really did start the day with a mug of PG Tips tea.)