You walk outside, and it’s so hot you can’t breathe. Feels like you could carve the air. Humidity is roughly that of a swimming pool. A heated pool. The heat index is triple digits. You stand next to someone taller just for the shade. If there’s a breeze, it’s air from a furnace. And the furnace is on. Your shirt, your pants and anything under sticks to you like a wet rag. A hot wet rag.

It’s hot enough to melt the Doughboy statue’s iron bayonet in Overton Park.

It’s July Fourth in Memphis.

Conaway: After 25 years, it’s time to put some local teeth in our game

They were dressed in wool, suits of wool, with vests and knee pants and stockings and whatever you call those kerchief things high around their necks. Some in wigs. There was no air conditioning. There were no fans. The man who discovered electricity was in the room, but electricity was not.

It was hot enough to melt the iron clapper off the Liberty Bell above them.

It was July Fourth in Philadelphia 249 years ago.

Many of them didn’t like many of the others. By the time they signed the Declaration of Independence, most of them weren’t crazy about any of the others. But in the face of that heat, in the face of their profound differences, in the face of their weariness and distrust, they created a document that guides, that inspires, that challenges us today.

They were men, all men, of property and influence, but they created a blueprint in black ink for a country where all were included and counted as equal in principle if not yet in fact, and that rights of the people were unalienable, not a gift to be given or taken away at the whim of power.

Conaway: Wide-eyed wonder, our town discovered

Their signing put them and their families at great personal risk, and many of their fortunes and property became forfeit.

They did that in the name of liberty from tyranny, in the name of independence from kings and royalty, in the name of rule by the people, by the many and never again by the one.

Try doing all that sweating and itching in wool. Most of us think hardship is raising the thermostat to 74, and that personal sacrifice is turning off some of the lamps.

As we raise a beer and a hot dog, as we light up the night sky, we should carve out a moment or two to think about those people in that hot room in Philadelphia and compare what inspired them to act and the reality of where we are today.

This country belongs to every one of us. Every. One. Of. Us. That’s what we celebrate today. That’s what we honor and share today. As messy as democracy is, it’s our mess to clean up. As easy as it is to turn it all over to somebody else and not worry about it, doing that is to betray everything our founders did on July 4, 1776.

Thank God, they could take the heat.

Conaway: Don’t play a game in Nashville. Don’t give Nashville a dime.

When I was old enough to start wondering about things outside my neighborhood, my father told me about Memphis at the time, then in 1957 or 1958.

E.H. Crump had died in 1954, and the city was struggling for identity and direction. The city wasn’t alone. Crump had made every decision for not just Memphis but for the entire state of Tennessee.

While he was doing that for decades, Atlanta blew by us like a peach pit in the wind, becoming the South’s most important city and never looking back. Even in the unlikely event that Crump was the benevolent boss of popular belief, he was a boss nevertheless, and things like race relations and the sharing of the city were frozen in place for 40 years.

“No one really ran for office,” Dad told me. “Mr. Crump picked the winners in advance. No one worried about things like street maintenance or garbage pickup. Mr. Crump took care of that. Police, too, and fire and permitting and building. Mr. Crump took care of all that.”

And while Mr. Crump was taking care of all that, we lost a couple of generations of possible real leadership and genuine progress, proud of our horn ordinance and church steeples, becoming the “quietest city in the country with more churches than gas stations.”

Conaway: Assault by packaging is open and shut case

People in Memphis knew their place, and their place was standing dead still.

July Fourth is in you. Look for it, and realize you’re a revolutionary. Find it, and take responsibility to the best of your ability to not settle for less than we deserve.

You might remember reading John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” about the Great Depression and the forced migration of farmers from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to California. In the 1940 movie classic based on the book, Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, sought by hard men cracking down on the migrants. He has to explain to his mother why he’s diverting attention from his family and striking out on his own.

Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why, they could kill ya, and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom Joad: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then ...

Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?

Tom Joad: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark — I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look — wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin' up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build — I’ll be there, too.”

Conaway: We are Warriors, every one

July Fourth is a celebration. It’s also a reminder of the courage and sweat that freed us.

No one rules us. If someone tries, be there.

I’m a Memphian, and Happy Independence Day.