Back from the dead for a very important birthday message

It's that time of year again - time for us to throw some dead animals on a fire, drink a juice made from fermented flowers and shoot some explosives pointlessly into the air, all in honor of the fact that around this time 235 years ago, a bunch of passionate (or crazy, or both, depending on your point of view), brilliant men wrote a document saying "Enough is enough." Sitting there in the heat and the humidity (and boy, in the past month or so have I learned about heat and humidity), fifty-six men decided that the injustices rained upon them by Great Britain were no longer tolerable - and as such, the nation of United States of America would no longer sit back and accept it. "...all men are created equal," they wrote. Britain refused to treat them as such, and so it was natural, the morally right thing, to dissolve all bonds uniting them.

Simple, really. Brilliant. Unprecedented, at the time. World-changing.

It's been a rough year, yet again. Our economy still stumbles. We've had tornados and floods, political scandals and conflicts. Our government nearly shut down. We've made significant leaps towards equality in some arenas - soon gay, lesbian and bisexuals will be allowed to serve openly in the military, and can now get married in six states. Six out of forty-four may not seem like a lot, but consider that sodomy was illegal (and such laws were selectively enforced only against same-sex couples) within the past decade, and the progress is clear.

25,000 American soldiers died during that first war. Today we still have troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan; more than 6,000 of them have died. This resonates more with me this year than it did last - petty, perhaps, but at the end of January I raised my right hand and swore to spend the next four years in uniform, protecting and upholding the Constitution against all enemies. And in April one of my friends, who I've known since the first day of college six years ago, deployed to Afghanistan. Many of my new friends will be heading over there in the next six months. I may be myself.

It's a funny country we have here. We began with those words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." and proceeded, for 236 years, to refuse to treat all men equally. This is a nation that was born in the mud and fire and pain and heartbreak of war, a war we were thoroughly unprepared for, that we went into without an idea of what came after the war - and here we are, two and a half centuries later, doing the same thing, plunging headfirst into war after war. Some may be morally justified, truly fighting for the ideals our nation was founded upon. Some may be fought for vague and muddy, nebulous reasons. Do we always get it right? No, not by a long shot. But sometimes we do.

So here's to Jefferson and Franklin and Adams. To the fights we've fought for the right reasons - for freedom and liberty. To those who've fought in uniform, in the press, and in the streets; those who've fought against fighting and stood resolute and said that they will not raise up arms, that their fight will forever be one of words and ideas but never violence. To the flag on the moon and Francis Scott Key's flag which still hangs in our nation's capitol. To all the patches on the quilt - the colors and ideas and conflicts and contradictions that make up this country. We have been many things, and will continue to be many things, and someday maybe we'll figure out what we are.