Please stop equating July 4 to war

"This date in history" sends me a text every morning telling me what big deal things happened on this day way back when.  The lead is something like Independence Day - on this date in 1776 for instance. There follows an occasion celebrity birth or death, perhaps some political event and then, a recounting of what took place in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Civil War, and a dozen other wars and conflicts that mark our history.

It isn't - today, July 4, 2014 that is - about war.  July 4th isn't a war day. Stop it. Stop the obsession of linking patriotism with war. Soldiers are patriotic in defense of the country. Wars are not patriotic in the least.

Today is a day when we celebrate the gathering of high minds who saw a clear direction and set about doing it.  To give all the rest of us a shared vision, they - these high minds - wrote a document that goes to the very center and heart of a nation 237 years later and into each year in between.

The "declaration committee" of that gathering of men figured it out and said it.  We went to war around it and perhaps over it, but to equate war with the document is to miss the point entirely.

Today is a day to be thankful for the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and a host of others, who possessed a vision to which we owe everything.