Happy Birthday America

I love the Fourth of July, I love all that it represents.  Family, food, parades, fireworks (as I write this I can hear two different grand finales going off) but mostly, it represents freedom.  I don't know a whole lot about our nation's history.  I don't know the details of what ever caused a group of terrorists, by definition, to flip the bird to King George and decided to make this ours.  I know what most know, that there were taxes and tea and redcoats and men in wigs.  I know that a few men had some pretty great ideas.  Those ideas got put to paper and well, here we are 237 years later, still arguing about some of them.
Our nation has a 237 year history of doing pretty good most of the time but when we screwed up, it was in big and ugly ways.  And yet, the people of America, the United States citizens were usually able to get things right again.  They were able to come together and work together and, well, you know, make us all proud.
Where is that now?  I feel like this is a nation pitted against each other like pissed off women at a PTA meeting.  There is a lot of yelling and finger pointing and maybe a few finger snaps, but nothing is getting done.  It is embarrassing and shameful.  We are a nation of great wealth, of great minds and of huge hearts and yet, we cannot do much else but hate. 
I am a left wing republican.  I want marriage equality and I want to carry a gun.  I want lower college costs for many but a free ride for none based on their social-economic background.  I want welfare or SNAP or whatever clever name it is given to stop if it means that people can continue to buy $5.49 twelve packs of pop.  I want WIC broadened to make sure that little brains get the foods they need to succeed.  I want those same little brains to have access to good childcare while their moms and dads have jobs.  And if they don't have job then they have classes to take.  No more free rides, for anyone. 
It doesn't make a bit of difference to me if Obama was born in Hawaii, Kenya or the moon.  He has been president now for over five years now, a birth certificate won't change that.  Bitching about any of it won't change it, any of it.  
Can we get back to being a nation that was kick ass?  One that made the right decisions for its citizens?  Can we get to a place where flags fly year round, not just on four or five days a year, and those flags are made here.