The Night I Saw America from Boulder

THE NIGHT I SAW AMERICA FROM BOULDER

By Douglas Lee

July 4th, 2021

MY FRIENDS’ HOUSE stands cantilevered on a long steep face of one of the foothills that overlooks Boulder. They tell me they’re 2,000 feet above the town, and from their deck I can see not only all of Central and North Boulder and far eastward across the Great Plains, with Denver lurking on the southern horizon, but the several towns that cluster to Boulder’s southeast and northwest. Sometime over a decade ago, I stood on their deck on the evening of July 4th and watched each town on the plain below hold its fireworks show, all considerately staggered in an agreed-upon schedule which began when dusk was banished and true night fell, and ran on, one following the other, for the next two hours or more.

I was mesmerized, and also moved by this prolonged celebration of ourselves as a nation governed on democratic concepts rather than authoritarian force. Perhaps a dozen neighboring villages and towns had all collaborated by celebrating the nation holiday separately, one by one, and thus together. Something about that echoes the principles of our American Republic’s union.

Then it dawned on me.

I was looking at America as it can be, as it should be.

And I wanted to become a part of it.

And so I moved to Boulder, which hope and intend to make my home and community until the day I die.

A ban on fireworks this Fourth of July doesn’t change the holiday’s meaning—that we are one nation, indivisible. God’s part in state of affairs may be stated in whatever way makes you feel good and right about it.

And so, I pray as I stand out tonight and gaze out over the dazzle of streetlights and houses that fan out from the Foothills’ feet, that we will remain so.

So I send this little postcard of thought from me to you, Relative, Stranger, Friend, Fellow American, that we may join together in a glittering, light-filled vision of who we are and what we can be on this dismaying year’s Fourth of July.

Yours truly,

Doug Lee