I looked it up, and see that my family could conveniently participate in one of the Restore the Fourth protests. So I just talked to my wife about it, and that is our plan for celebrating the Fourth of July ("Independence Day" is the holiday's official name) this year. What could be more American as a way to celebrate America than to participate in a public protest?

By the way, our friends in Taiwan, which now enjoys freedom of the press after people power pushed out a dicatorial regime, have produced one of those funny animated news videos

http://youtu.be/hjItu4SchJU

urging viewers to participate in the Restore the Fourth protests. This is why I am glad I participated in Taiwan's democracy movement[1], and why I continue to support China's democracy movement. What goes around comes around. Democracy can never have too many friends. Freedom is something for all of humankind to share and to defend and to cherish.

[1] The dictatorship in power in Taiwan when I first lived there eventually fell, after a largely peaceful people power revolution that forced a transformation to an open political system. In the years leading up to that transformation, people I know personally were imprisoned for leading peaceful protests urging free and fair elections and a stop to censorship. (For example, the father of one of my wife's high school classmates was in prison while they were in high school. The classmate is now the godmother of my son who was born in Taiwan.) Most people don't have the courage to go to prison--especially prisons like those in Taiwan at the time. But courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Burmese, Burma (Chin), Burma (Jing-paw), Burma (Karen), Burma (Mon), Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Thai, Tibetan, and Ukrainian there to share with your friends around the world.