On the Fourth of July, a declaration of dependence

Americans are a freedom-loving people.

Or, we used to be.

Gallery

Festive Fourth of July recipes: These easy summer recipes will help spice up your Independence Day menus.

Video

Southern chef and cookbook author Virginia Willis reviews what you need for successful outdoor eating on the go. You can find her picnic recipes (Lightened Up Pimento Cheese, Oven-Fried Chicken on a Stick, Roasted Green Bean and Potato Salad and Individual Fruit Cobblers) online in The Post’s Recipe Finder.

Before clutter, before Google and Facebook and voluntary enslavement to our kids. Before cellphones that make us always reachable and never alone. Before financial institutions reaching into our “convenient” online bill-paying mechanisms and taking fees. Before electric grids and fiber-optics and wireless transmissions that, when they go down, go down really big — and drag our self-reliance down with them.

Before we built our shaded backyard retreat but gave up our free time.

We may fly the tea party flag and protest against the tyranny of federal power, but in our daily lives we now are a freedom-surrendering people. Government mandates and perceived incursions into our rights as enshrined by the Founders? The least of our problems.

We diminish our independent selves all by ourselves.

Take this quiz:

You return from day-off errands to children demanding, “Why didn’t you take your phone?!” Do you snap, “Because I didn’t want you to bother me!” or do you plead, instantly, “I totally forgot, sweetie, I’m so sorry”?

Each day since Saturday, in downtown Bethesda, the Starbucks has been infested with snakes.

They slither in and stay — white cords, black cords, twisting around each other, three sometimes crawling out of the same device, into outlets zealously guarded by coffee squatters. Powerful people rendered powerless check the Pepco outage map . . . refresh . . . refresh . . . refresh.

They do not make their own coffee by boiling water on their gas range, which they have remembered can be lit with a match.

They do not shop at the farmers market. His harvest is going unbought and uneaten, wilting in the heat.

Why? He shrugs.

“Nobody has power.”

A bounty you could grab and eat right on the spot! Berries. Beans. Carrots. Lettuce. Raw food is only a farm-to-table trend when it’s on a composed plate in a serenity restaurant?

What passes for brilliant adaptability to harsh conditions is this: At the Starbucks, a young man reaches into his backpack and, with a flourish, pulls out a surge protector with six outlets.

“The unplugging is unnerving,” muses Anthony P. Graesch. “I think it speaks really powerfully to how we have come to rely on our household base, and our consumer technology in everyday life, in this very intimate relationship. We have forgotten how to live without it.”

People say this kind of thing all the time now, with ho-hum regularity. But Graesch is not a futurist. He’s an anthropologist and one of the four authors of “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century.” A meticulous, systematic documentation by a cross-disciplinary team of academics of the material world of 32 families in Los Angeles, the book is intended as a visual ethnography of middle-class American households, “an unflinching examination of actual homes amid all the joys and messiness of real life.”

And what do we see? Mountains of material culture, choking off space and time. Irrefutable evidence of what that evolutionary psychologist Janis Joplin told us: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”