Last night, I wished America a happy 230th birthday from the 26th floor of a high rise office building in downtown Columbus as fireworks exploded in areas all around the 15 mile pie wedge view of the city I had.

Firecrackers were around 200 years before Christ was born when the Chinese roasted bamboo to make loud pops that scared little children and then made them laugh as their parents hugged them tight to let them know they were okay, that it was just for fun.

But in America, fireworks on the 4th of July are a sacred tradition, one in which we preen our feathers, pat each other on the back, and congratulate ourselves for bringing the concepts of freedom and democracy to the world even though they've been around since before Socrates took up doing shots of hemloch.

But I like to keep it real on the 4th, which is why my favorite American Founding Father is Patrick Henry--a man who kept it so real, he never left his home state of Virginia to run for the pussy office of Commander-in-Chief. Here was a man who was so adamantly opposed to replacing the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution that he threatened to become a revolutionary against the very government he had very nearly died to help establish. Patrick Henry knew the Civil War was coming with the federalizing of the nation under a strong central government--only a fool wouldn't have.

So, I believe that is important to take stock of one's life on their birthday and that a nation should constantly be in a state of self-examination. And here's the deal with America--we are a great nation peopled by great individuals full of the spirit of kindness and community. But we are also a nation bridled by corporate greed, a greed which currently controls the media and therefore the hegemonic process of cultural identity. Things are very plastic here in America right now. Our entire reality is manufactured by the 24 hour news channels and the color chart which tells us how safe to feel and which the government uses to shock us into inaction and mind-numbing complacency.

Racism, religious intolerance and homophobia are an unfortunate reality which affects many in our country, putting up barriers and blowing up bridges of opportunity. But for every bridge that is blown up, a new mountain rises which demands the will and skill of the individual to climb it and move beyond to the green pastures in the valley of peace that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about almost 40 years ago as he stood before the Washington monument and urged the spirit of our nation, and the spirit of mankind, on to a new reality of world peace.

Peace is the absence of war but world peace has nothing to do with either. World peace is a marriage of mankind to one another, like land continents slamming together out of sheer mortality, human beings must learn to get along with one another in a system of scarce resources or learn to sing hymns silently as our civilization, indeed our species, sinks into the evolutionary abyss which has engulfed millions of biological entities before us. World Peace will be the most challenging evolutionary obstacle human beings have ever been stupid or brave enough to attempt and the first full-hearted step of the journey will be the only one needed for true freedom is not a movement, it's a spark; it's a light switch being thrown on forever illuminating what was cast in absolute darkness before.

Birthdays are also a time to look to the future, a time to dream of what can be. Many see a future of smarter bombs, oil pipelines that flow to one destination, and billions of human beings subjugated under the mental slavery of a common ideological fix--a metaphor for the masses which will placate and inundate the creative and revolutionary spirit which brought human beings down from the trees onto the hot African plains where we went from foraging to farming to murdering our own and stealing their stock, then it calling it right by framing governments around the action. There hasn't been a government in history that hasn't lied to, stolen from, and murdered its own people by drawing lines, pointing fingers, and calling out "monster." The only thing that changes is where the lines get drawn and this is what we call History.

But I believe there can be a day when all lines get erased. I believe this because I'm both a dreamer and a fool, the latter of which the world is too full of and the former far too bereft.

Birthdays should be for looking into the heart of the moment, making the space between seconds freeze so that reality can be viewed as it truly is--without bounds, without ego, and without reference. It has been said that time is a river and in that river flows the deep and collective sorrow of the human race. We are each born. We each die. And no one knows what happens before or after these two events; all sorrow springs from this mystery as does all inspiration. Great fear and great faith are the primary drivers of the human spirit and we must each make a choice, every second of our lives, when we are engaging in action and in relationship with one another, which of these forces we allow to drive us.

Happy birthday, America. You've made it so much longer than history predicted and you have so much further to go before you reach the destination of your faith and your potential.

May God bless the human being and may we have mercy on each other.

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