Spending the 4th of July in Andover, New Hampshire should be a prerequisite to those studying the value of living in community. Our little town of 2,500 people bursts at the seams as thousands of visitors flock to the village green in the heart of Proctor’s campus for a flea market and carnival-like atmosphere. At noon, the bell in Maxwell Savage Hall tolls to signal the start of the parade. Local fire companies, floats, and bands weave their way through campus along North Street before looping back down Main Street. Bands play on the green, JJ’s gets way more traffic than a post-assembly rush, and Carr Field fills up with chairs, blankets, and sparklers as we all await fireworks set off from the Proctor Ski Area.
For the 92nd year, Andover has hosted this 4th of July celebration. Nearly everyone wears red, white, and blue. Flags fly on strollers, horses, and every other means of transportation as crowds consume snow cones, baked goods, peruse the Andover Library Book Sale in the Stone Chapel, and see friends and neighbors they haven’t seen in a while. The Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, and God Bless America blare over the loudspeakers throughout the morning, reminding each of us of the freedoms at the heart of our constitution, and our responsibility to ensure those freedoms continue to be available to all who call America home.
Independence walks hand in hand with responsibility; a responsibility to ensure the freedom we are privileged to experience never limits us in providing that same freedom to others. This is one of our biggest challenges - as a country, as a town, as a school, as individuals. Freedom should not be a zero sum game, a pie with only so many slices. How do we move out of a fixed mindset as a society, where providing freedom to others is perceived as a threat to our own experience?
We must believe it is possible to grow the pie. We can both possess deep gratitude to the veterans who fight to protect our nation’s freedom AND to speak out against the treatment of migrant children detained at the border. We must believe it is possible to fly an American flag with pride AND to disagree with specific policies of our government. We must believe it is possible Proctor’s educational model is perfectly suited to impact adolescents AND there is room to refine our work further as a school. We must believe it is possible to respectfully disagree without questioning each other's humanity.
4th of July celebrations in Andover (and around the country) tend to focus on the ideals of freedom more than the realities of the responsibility that accompanies it. Depending on the color of our skin, socio-economic status, and access to education, the freedom we experience in our daily lives varies considerably, as does our responsibility to extend that freedom to others. In a polarized America, we have a responsibility to objectively look at our lives and the lives of those around us to identify misalignment between our ideals and our actions as we seek to move closer to a collective experience that mirrors our beliefs. Independence is an incredible gift, one that carries with it great responsibility to preserve it for generations to come, but never, ever at someone else's expense.
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