So, us Americans are annoying. And we understand that entirely. It’s actually one of the things we’re famous for, so some of us wanna rock that… Well, we hate that side of us too. Now, onto the 4th of July.

Most of the time, we kinda hate our own country. Not quite as much as all of you seem to… But we do. We hate it because we live here, and we see from the inside all of the little flaws. From the outside, sure you see our…interesting government and our annoying boastfulness, but you don’t see the little things that make us hate us.

The 4th is our one day of the year when we recognize that, sure our “free” country is kinda ridiculous, but we should love it here. And we do. For one day (the whole week when it comes to fireworks…), we get to blow stuff up into pretty colors, we get to gorge ourselves on all the meat, pie, and alcohol we can, and we get to pretend that, at least for 24 hours, our country still signifies everything it used to.

We realize that our country isn’t exactly as free as we say it is, and we realize that there are countries with similar, if not better, human rights to ours. It’s just… Unlike most countries, we fought for ours, then had to build it from the ground up. We attempted an unheard of and seemingly impossible war against the biggest and strongest empire in the world, and we won. We were just 13 little colonies, a ragtag group of misfits with a dream beyond what colonies could accomplish.

We may get a little (okay, a lot) annoying boasting about our “freedom,” but the 4th is not about that. What we’re celebrating today is that, in the most impossible war, we broke free.

Not that we are free.

That we broke free.