An Invitation to a non-specific gathering on the fourth day of the month of July
You are cordially invited to our home for a backyard friendship get-together to happen (for no explicit reason at all other than it fits our schedules) on Saturday, July 4th, beginning at 2 PM. We will have drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic), light snacks, and hamburgers, and hot dogs to cook on our grill. Please feel free to bring anything else or nothing at all. Dress casually, and you should not at all feel obligated to wear any specific colors that may signal a devoted love, support, or defense of anything at all, including but not limited to: sports teams, street gangs, or an independent nation with a defined area of land, its own government, and recognized sovereignty.
Should you wish to wear any colors that may signify support of any of these things, you are not explicitly forbidden to do so. You are free to dress how you choose. This isn’t a Soviet Gulag; it’s a free congregation of friends in our backyard. For example, perhaps you’d like to wear the (randomly selected) colors of red, white, and blue in order to pledge allegiance to the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. You’d like to wear these colors in support of this team, despite the fact that there are some fans of this team who are annoying and bad and ruining the worldwide reputation of upstanding, good-hearted fans of the team with their embarrassing behavior.
That’s great. We love that for you, and we support your decision to try to reclaim your fandom from the crazies who sully the name of the red, white, and blue with their hateful rhetoric, intolerance, and hard-headed insistence that they support the “greatest team in the world” despite not being on top of their game for the past few decades. In fact, some might say that the team has become a joke — hiring terrible leaders, making bad decision after bad decision, refusing to learn from their mistakes, and causing the most hardcore of the annoying fans to double down, plant firm in their willful ignorance, and welcome the inevitable crash that will come as a direct result of their actions.
But, no, by all means, go ahead and wear the red, white, and blue if you wish. Fly your flag high. We mean your proverbial flag, of course.
Coincidentally, our local municipality has chosen the evening of the fourth day of the month of July to present a public display of fireworks. It so happens that our backyard is a wonderful place to view this show, and we invite you to stay past dark to watch the sky light up with propulsive pyrotechnics. We hope that we can all admire the show and look at the pretty lights without mentioning that the same skyrocket technology used to launch our aerial entertainment was first designed and used for warfare. Or that the show itself is meant as a simulation of war. Or that it feels wrong to crane our necks upwards while we and “ooooh” and “ahhh” at fun patterns made by fake bombs when real wars are going on in the real world right now.
While we’re on the subject of war, we would like to ask you all to keep your discussions “light” and “not depressing” during our funtime friendship backyard fourth day of the month of July random get-together. We’d like to just enjoy some hamburgers (we have cheese for cheeseburgers, too!), hot dogs, and benign explosions in the night sky in peace, without being reminded of anything at all from our everyday lives (we mentioned we’ll have alcohol, right?)
We think we could all use a day that feels like a separation from our regular lives. We’d all benefit from a day of freedom from the normal rise-and-grind rat race and liberty from the oppressive cycle of bad news and terrible luck. We hope the fourth day of the month of July can be this day for us. Perhaps it can be our independence day.
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