The Fourth of July has always been a special holiday for me, because I was born on it, in 1950, in a little hospital in Flint, Michigan.

The standard remark people have made to me, on discovering this curiosity, is: "Well, you sure must have come in with a bang." But I'm in a good mood, so I let them live.

But if you have to be born on a holiday, I enthusiastically endorse the Fourth. Halloween? No one's coming to your party. Thanksgiving's no good; a day devoted to decency leaves little latitude for merriment. If you're born on Christmas, the holiday of a thousand presents, you either feel your birthday was stolen from you or that you are the promised one.

But the Fourth is celebratory and so public. It's Independence Day, the day everyone is born. Uncle Sam stands free on stilts, little kids freely mimic the fireflies with their sparklers, the muscle cars at the main intersection rev their engines waiting for the light to change.

Deep down, America has always been a little crazy. And if today's your birthday, you're all the good things -- democracy, modernity, and rock and roll -- rolled into a big bionic firecracker.

How many nights I sat on grass growing damp under the blanket, as the fire department readied the display. You arrive at dusk, and it's another ninety minutes before the first fuse is lit. By the time it starts, your elbows and neck are already aching, and the mosquitoes have made you half crazy from biting.

But then the rockets go up, and they reach their apex, and for an instant time stands still, then-- kapow.

If you get a chance, rent the 1984 Godfrey Reggio movie Koyaanisqaatsi, subtitled Life out of Balance, and see it on the biggest screen available. It's a wordless cinematographic documentary that pioneered many film techniques that are cliche today, like clouds racing across the city sky, and sped-up freeways. The effect is to contrast the tacky vanity of human endeavors with the gorgeous panoramas of nature and time.

But the last eleven minutes of the movie are heartbreaking. While Philip Glass's melancholy organ fugue endless spirals and repeats, the camera follows a Titan rocket launch in slow-motion. Somehow, despite the incredible speed of the launch, the camera stays focused on the rocket. You feel you are right next to the doomed vessel.

You know nothing about the rocket's contents or the plans for the launch. But you know that it the technology is the work of hundreds of the most talented humans on earth. And as it rises, and the music plays, you feel the hopes of our species rise with it into the stratosphere.

And then, something goes wrong, and the rocket wobbles out of its proper trajectory, and it begins to fall, venting gas on its way down.

Because it is slow-motion, the rocket seems to fall forever, to the sad triplets on the organ. You have been watching it so long at this point that you feel you are the rocket's parent. Seeing your offspring, your highest aspirations, tumble helplessly back to earth, is strangely heartbreaking.

That is what technology, and for that matter, all human endeavor does. It is our glory that we get up every day and give it another shot. Until we die, we try.

As for the Fourth of July, we know that independence arises from the will. The will inside us is what external tyrant can take from us. It defines all the hope and pathos there is in being human. We are not guaranteed by our creator to achieve happiness, only that we have the right to pursue it. Every rocket falls to earth, and nobody lives forever, much less happily ever after. Still, we keep pursuing -- ferociously, illogically, stubbornly.

So when you are sitting out on that blanket Sunday night, with the explosions momentarily lighting up the brown cloud of gunpowder hanging in the air, consider what the ruckus is really about.

We rise, we fall, and as long as we are able, we rise again. Against the certainty of ultimate failure, we keep hurling ourselves at our dreams.

The hero is you, no matter what day you were born.

Happy Fourth, everybody.