July 14, 2008

Why couldn’t the 4th always fall on a Friday?

Maybe it was the perfect weather, maybe I just needed the break, but if we could get the 4th of July to fall on a Friday each year, it’d be fine with me.

It was kind of like having two Saturdays in a row, and since Saturday mornings are pretty much the best part of a week, that’s a good thing. And if fireworks kept you up on the night of the 4th, no big deal ... you had Saturday morning to sleep in if you wanted.

But wait ... maybe we could engineer this. Memorial Day, after all, wasn’t always a Monday holiday. And the holiday isn’t called “The 4th of July,” it’s “Independence Day.”

Any good American history student can tell you that the exact date that our forefathers officially declared we were independent of Britain is fairly nebulous at best.

Sometime between June 10, when the Continental Congress voted to establish a committee to prepare a declaration and July 8, when the adopted and signed declaration was first read in public, our nation was born. John Adams thought that July 2 would be the historical day. What exactly happened on July 4 appears “murky,” as several historians agree.

So, it wouldn’t be sacrilege to celebrate Independence Day on the first Friday of July, although I bet there’d be an uproar. And Congress has spent their time debating less weighty issues than this.

Last December, for example, House Resolution 847 was introduced on the floor so that Congress could go on record as stating that “Christmas and Christians are important.” And just last month, H. Res 970 designated Monday, June 30, 2008 at “National Corvette Day.” And it’s rather routine that they pass resolutions congratulating sports teams who win championships.

So debating whether to make Independence Day the front end of a three-day weekend might be more than they want to tackle. But we could argue it will save energy costs (a popular goal these days), and we could argue it’s more inclusive as it doesn’t discriminate against Adams’ choice of July 2 or the public reading on July 8.

One bad side effect may be for those Yankee Doodle Dandies (cue the music ... “born on the 4th of July”). Our honorable mayor happens to be one of those, and has sometimes had the city’s fireworks display described as his birthday party.

The words for that song may have to be changed, or played, perhaps, just on those years when the 4th would actually fall on the 4th ... oops, I mean Independence Day.

Old habits die hard.

by MARK MILLER

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