Our little family enjoying a canoe ride into sunset on a lake up north.
This independence day I would like to propose another holiday:
Interdependence Day.
Don't get me wrong, the 4th of July is a fine holiday that celebrates the founding of a country that is slowly growing into its initial vision of freedom and justice for all.
The picture above is of our small family in a borrowed canoe on a lake at a friend's cabin. A next door neighbor whom we barely know took the picture and sent it to us via the son-in-law of the friend. Our whole trip "up north" in Minnesota was supported by an infrastructure that others have tended, down to the kind woman and her shy child who tended the garden by the playground where we paused on our journey north.
Though we look like the idyllic, inward focused, nuclear family, we are surrounded by and embedded in communities of interdependence. We need to celebrate them.
We too often succumb to a harmful vision of independence that each person is an island responsible only for and to themselves. It underplays, assumes, and conceals our interdependence in order to glorify the rugged individualist. Henry Thoreau is often blamed for popularizing this vision, but he was not alone at his cabin in the woods on Walden Pond -- he went there to speak to us and he had more visitors there than in the city (like all those who have a nice cabin on a lake).
The test of all great religions is how they frame compassion for the community. But also how they extend that compassion to the other, the stranger, and the outcast -- to those who are in danger of loosing the supports of community.
We need to tend to and celebrate our interdependence. Perhaps we could set aside the Saturday after Thanksgiving as interdependence day. The Friday is taken by Native American Heritage day, another recognition of our interdependence. These three together would be a welcome tonic in this most individualistic of nations.