Happy 4th Happy 250th America

Few people we know seem to be in a celebratory mood this 4th of July, but with the 250th Anniversary as well I feel we must mark the ambitious though unreliable experiment America is.

I have loved America all my life: though born in Britain, I always identified more with American culture (music, movies, art—though having grown up in the 1960s, British music offered strong competition) and American causes. Although I remember vividly the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK, and the massive cultural shock and upheaval in their wake, I believed—perhaps naively, though I think not—that America was uniquely suited to rise to the challenges and had the social mobility (more then than now) and vast energy and passion to overcome the violent truths that were part of both the American present (then and now) and its history.

I lived through the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s—though at a distance and as a child in England—and I found them both horrifying and inspiring. But the energy of the marchers and protesters, and their largely peaceful defiance of a highly oppressive system, made me love the potential of America more.

Likewise, the struggles then and now to secure rights for everyone, no matter their gender identity or their freedom to express themselves and enjoy relationships unbridled by society, inspired me that America ultimately could be a welcoming country for all.

I was a (late) part of the Woodstock generation and someone who was immensely moved by the first moon landing of Apollo 16, and the sense it magnified that our planet Earth was this exceptional blue and green haven in a vast almost unimaginable cosmos. America was clearly identified with both these achievements, even if the president at the time—Nixon—seemed (and was proven by events to be) a force of criminality, if not actual evil (a concept that as a Buddhist I don’t truly recognize).

I have been a US citizen for 20 years now. I have lived here longer, in South Beach, Florida, and in Los Angeles, Sonora, Santa Cruz and Marin County—the last four all in California. I love California with a passion equaled only by the Sahara (although I‘m not sure I’d want to live in the Sahara) and I jokingly refer to myself as a native-born Californian.

I have raised children here with my wife, although sadly I also lost my first child to cancer in Britain in 1989 before I moved to America. I love America, I consider myself American, not British-American, and the Stars and Stripes stirs something exciting in me that the British flag does not. If I had been around in Philadelphia or Boston or wherever in 1776, I know which side I would have been on, and it wouldn’t have involved any red threads.

I‘m not thrilled by the historical present. I miss President Obama with a passion. He represented for me all that was good and wise and hopeful and free about America. He and his wife Michelle and their beautiful daughters brought a grace and a power and a humor and a humility to America that made our nation great, that made it a country that other countries could look to as a model of tolerance, inclusion, innovation and compassion. He also reformed American healthcare in the most inclusive way possible, given the obstructionism of Congress, and crucially banished the pre-existing condition provisions in health insurance policies that crippled so many families.

Despite the evidence of the present, I am hopeful for the future. I believe that we will rise again and find the empathy and kindness essential to any great nation. I am hopeful that the last ten years will soon be a blip in the history books.

To celebrate this 4th of July and 250th Anniversary of the United States of America, I worked (for far more time than I expected) with Gemini AI to create a flag-shaped panel of various American flags that would represent our diversity.

I included in this a new flag that I designed with Gemini—a “quantum flag” to represent the future. I was happy with what Gemini created for that and include some additional images below, but the task of assembling the panel of flags grew increasingly frustrating, despite many different approaches, because as I worked on the panel of flags, it was extremely difficult—despite explicit instructions each time not to change anything that we had already created or to allow the existing images to deteriorate in any way—to prevent precisely that from happening.

Anyway, however you’re feeling personally, I hope you enjoy this 250th birthday of America. I hope you hold in your hearts a love and compassion for everyone who’s here, and equally a sense of responsibility and love for the wonderful nature and geology that is both America and our beautiful planet. And I hope you have an amazing 4th of July, even—or especially—if you’re spending it at home quietly with friends, family or even just yourself.

Feel loved and share that love with all people and with the precious planet and fellow species that we must take better care of.

And I hope you enjoy Gemini’s representations here of a quantum flag for the future: