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I have learned something new in the past few weeks. For years, my school teachers, my parents, my college professors, including my history of the Constitution professor, drummed into my head that the Fourth of July, or Independence Day, was a day for us all to celebrate our freedom. Freedom from suppression, from control, from bullying. It was to celebrate the founding of our new country, our new Constitution — like its guarantees of our freedom of speech, and our freedom of assembly. Silly me. I believed all those people I had trusted for all those years.

Now I find that I was, apparently, wrong about all of that. I now realize that it took the Sandpoint Lions to redefine for me what the Fourth of July was all about — certainly not freedom of speech or assembly, but instead control, suppression and bullying. Those very things our Founding Fathers were getting us away from. We’re right back to honoring fear of those who don’t think the way we do, to suppressing other points of view, to bullying them into silence. Hmmm. Happy Fourth of July … Lions’ version.

MAUREEN GRAHAM

Sandpoint