#92 Independence Day by Bruce Springsteen

"But they Can't Touch Me Now

And You Can't Touch Me Now

They Ain't Gonna Do To Me

What I Watched Them Do To You"

Raising children includes passing down ideas, beliefs, and values from one generation to another. Religion, politics, a general worldview, ways of coping with life (healthy and unhealthy), habits, talents, strengths, weaknesses – these all play a part in building a foundation for the growing child. But the time will come, and oh how it must come, when these children will begin to make decisions based on what they’ve come to believe in, to mature their inheritances, to leave them behind, or to embrace them as their own.

Not everyone responds the same way to breaking away from their upbringing. “Boys run away”, instinctually rebelling against everything they see in their fathers and everything they see in themselves and everything they do not want to be. However, like a newborn country, called the U.S. of A, on its Independence Day, they physically break away and then become exactly what they needed to so desperately leave behind.

“Men make their way”. A choice is made. They recognize that they and the world in which they live is constantly changing. New people bring new ideas, and they constantly search for new reasons why, expanding their vision, and encompass a world greater than the one they are born into. They willfully and inevitably break free from one’s past physically, spiritually, or emotionally.

In either case, it is a mournful process. Recognizing the weaknesses in those that have raised and loved you is a painful experience. Surpassing them in intellectual or emotional growth seems to move against the natural process of life. Yet, it is a necessary process. Springsteen sings “I never meant to take those things away” as a child who knows that their own personal growth will shatter the protective barrier of beliefs and ideas their parent has embraced throughout their life, their means of survival. The child must break away and then “make their way”. Though, they’ll never truly be free from everything, the good and the bad. Remnants of love, splinters of “the darkness”, and slivers of the light remain and there’s celebration and there’s bound to be devastation – come Independence Day.


For Complete Lyrics Visit: http://www.brucespringsteen.net/songs/IndependenceDay.html