Our country celebrates its two hundred and thirty-sixth birthday tomorrow and the national holiday will be marked by colorful parades, fireworks displays and picnics from sea to shining sea, including here on the Vineyard where bells will ring and Islanders of every stripe will pause to commemorate the founding of our country.

This week’s picture-perfect weather, in contrast to the stifling heat gripping our nation’s capital, should make for an ideal day to enjoy the Fourth of July festivities and traditions that have been built here over generations.

On the front page today, the Gazette community conversation focuses on the ingredients that make a memorable holiday. Music, especially marching bands, lead the list.

In Edgartown, this will be the last hurrah for Fred B. Morgan Jr., who has served as grand marshal and organizer of that town’s Fourth of July parade for forty-three years. A true freedom fighter, having helped liberate France in World War II, Mr. Morgan’s decision to retire from the post he has held since the summer of Woodstock underscores our changing relationship to this most American of holidays.

In 1940 and 1941, with the much of the world at war, the Gazette joined with others calling for a moratorium on display of fireworks, saying it set a tone ill-suited to the serious tenor of the day. The Edgartown parade itself was suspended at the outbreak of the war and didn’t resume until 1956.

Today, our Independence Day celebrations seem to exist outside the world of politics — and maybe that’s for the best right now.

Off the beach and on the mainland, our nation feels caught in partisan wrangling, seemingly unable to agree even on the meaning of freedom let alone to aspire to the lofty goals outlined by the founding fathers. Do we really want to adjust our leisure activities to fit the tone of the times?

We take some solace in the fact that the United States Supreme Court last week did not, as many predicted it would, strike down a law passed by Congress and signed by the President. But we, like so many Americans, worry about the grinding negativity of an election campaign, fueled by too much money, that has only just begun.

Perhaps in the appreciation of a trumpet or the joy of waving a flag at a passing parade we will find not only a little joy, but common purpose.

What follows is the partial text of the Declaration of Independence.

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.