Life provides each of us moment–to-moment opportunities to choose between various possibilities, the ramifications of which we can only hypothesize. Even in retrospect, one never truly knows whether or not a particular past choice panned out. We humans stumble along in semi blindness, a few baby steps removed from shivering shriveled sacks of umbilical dependence upon our mothers’ life sustaining systems. We may eventually stand, walk, talk, chew, swallow and shout, but ultimately, we can barely exist independently.

Perhaps it is the very same fear of independence that sets in motion the symbiotic codependency between various factions of the species who are talented at exploitation of humans’ resources and those who are talented at subject-ation of their own personal resources. The need to follow and the need to lead are steeped in the same primordial tea, brewed deep inside our DNA network of intermingled genes, matter and consciousness. Independence is a word but not a deed.

Today, folks across this land mass surveyically designated as The United States of America, puff their distended chests proudly, waving tufts of colored cloth or plastic, each prominently emblazoned with the term “made in the USA.” It would be curious to delve a step or two deeper and inquire from where the machinery, the labor force, the raw materials, the energy, the shipping crates, the vehicles used to transport and other sundry peripheral factors regarding those “made in the USA” items originated. Curiosity is a natural component of independence I think, at least my curiosity has me considering the concept.

Today is a day of celebration. Ostensibly, we attempt to recreate the jubilance we presume our forefathers experienced after declaring, among other things: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Those learned and thoughtful arbiters of a fledgling nation’s needs intuited, conceived and proposed that, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Lofty concepts, simplistic in nature, idealistic in spirit, deterministic in action.