A Subversive Fourth of July Resolution... or Is that Revolution?

The quote is from "Firefly," a damned fine television show, albeit cancelled, cut down by Fox before it had the chance to take off, one that spawned a legion of fans of such devotion that an equally fine film, "Serenity," was eventually produced. Malcom Reynolds, Mal, one-time rebel soldier and idealist, current pirate captain of the ship Serenity, searches desperately for black-market work of every stripe, from smuggling to train jobs to heists, and has seemingly resigned himself to his place within the New Worlds Order that the Alliance has imposed, but nevertheless wears "a coat of a brownish color" and will always be a gorram Independent.

The backstory is that the Independents fought a losing war for freedom with the Alliance, a super-centralized government that sought and attained total control of a constellation of planets that humankind came to inhabit around 500 years in the future, due to Earth That Was suffocating from overpopulation. Looking past that bit of Malthusian theorizing, the themes of the show echo in the mind every Fourth of July: resistance to an overbearing government, the failure and murderous tyranny of a government that seeks to control and plan every aspect of life, a search for a better life outside the artificial barriers that government blankets society with.