How do you celebrate Independence Day in your country?

[jack]

I saw this as a "writer's block" blogging prompt on Livejournal. At first I was shocked: wasn't that just rampant American-centrism? And then I thought, was that just my own English-centrism?

England has never really become independent of anywhere, except perhaps the Roman Empire, but I don't think that has a good story and authoritative date attached (?)

But is it reasonable to assume that most countries have (at least one) independence day? And that its named and commemorated in a similar manner to America? Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_independence_days) which covers surprisingly many countries (with some number of notable exceptions, UK, Russia, China, Australia[1]...)

[1] Which may yet get there one day :)

Comments

[jack]

:) Yeah, unsurprisingly English-centric in England, alas.

But no-one would have batted an eyelid if the question had been "How do you celebrate its Independence Day in your country". It wasn't obvious to me (it still isn't) that the concept of independence day is sufficiently genaralised that you can just assume it's called "Independence Day" without further qualification without any "do you celebrate...?" or "what do you call...?"

[the_future_modernes]

I will definitely give you that. The question was badly posed.

[jack]

Yeah. As demonstrated by this discussion, the prompts are interesting whether or not they're well-thought-out: indeed, a simple prompt is probably better. So it's a useful feature, even if the individual prompts are badly thought out.

But this one just seemed especially over the top, when it strongly implied (if not stated) it was talking about the Fourth of July, and then asked "in your country..."