Independence Day is when we celebrate the birth of the United States. But it’s also a good time to reflect on the nation’s character.

We Americans are motivated by two sometimes contradictory impulses: one towards individualism and the other towards community.

The first is what causes us to embrace competition in everything from sports to business; to value free speech, even if it is unpopular speech; to allow laws to be overturned if they are found to infringe on even one person’s Constitutionally-protected liberty. The second impulse leads to volunteer fire departments, canned food drives, public schools and Social Security.

Both impulses are healthy components of the national character. A balance between the two keeps America both free and secure, valuing both liberty and equality, respecting both individual effort and communal sacrifice.

In recent decades, however, this balance has been upset. Individual striving and achievement has been celebrated while community spirit has waned. The sense that we’re all in this together has been replaced by a winner-take-all mentality. Hardship is a result of personal failure, says the new thinking; if you’re falling behind, it’s your fault.

This imbalance is reflected in modern tax and budget theory, which values reducing taxes on wealthy individuals over the community needs paid for with taxation. It can be seen in public services – from schools to national parks -?which are deteriorating from neglect, and rely more and more on user payments by individuals, regardless of income, instead of communal funding raised according to ability to pay.

The shift can also be seen in how the national wealth is divided. Real wages for most workers have been essentially stagnant for decades, while some individuals have seen their incomes soar. Productivity is up, but the fruits are not shared. A small fraction of the nation owns most of it.

Popular culture worships individual celebrity to such a degree that for the first time since the Great Depression some talentless people are famous just for being rich. Meanwhile, poverty is largely ignored.

While Maine has retained a greater sense of community than many areas of the country, the new thinking can be seen here, too. One example is the approach to public utilities. Publicly regulated utilities were developed for both practical and philosophical reasons in the late 19th century to distribute water, sewers, electricity and telephone service among the population. The tangled power lines of competing power companies obviously posed a danger and duplicated effort. But it was also seen that certain services were important enough that the government should regulate them in the public interest.

New technology has changed the utility industry, but so has the new emphasis on individualism over community. Utility deregulation is a good example of how this philosophy can become an article of faith that ignores real-life experience. As anyone who has puzzled over an electric or telephone bill over the past few years can tell you, there are times when informed central decision-making makes more sense than the uninformed, confused choices of myriad individuals.

Another example is the proposed sale of Maine’s residential phone lines by Verizon, which under various names has been providing regulated phone service to homes in the state for over a century. Verizon wants to get out of the less glamorous business of rural residential service to focus on more-profitable urban business customers.

The proposed buyer of the residential lines is a much-smaller, debt-laden company based in North Carolina called FairPoint Communications, which appears to have neither the resources nor experience to serve an area as big as Maine (not to mention New Hampshire and Vermont, whose home lines it will also receive under the plan). Complaints are a problem in the Maine towns FairPoint already serves; the firm has a history of bankruptcy.

If the plan is approved, it would be a victory for individual gain (in this case, that of the executives and shareholders of Verizon) over community good.

The community-based response to Verizon’s plan would be that it has a duty to continue to serve home-phone customers; that it is a utility providing a vital service, not a business selling discretionary consumables. Allowing an underequipped company to buy the home lines shifts the risk of poor phone service to the individual phone customer.

Another group that would suffer under the proposed deal would be phone company employees. Even though the new company claims it will respect existing union contracts and negotiate new ones in good faith, the economic pressures of trying to expand so fast so quickly will almost undoubtedly result in demands for givebacks from the workers. And if FairPoint goes bankrupt again, the union contracts could be nullified and the unions broken.

Returning to a better balance between individual and community doesn’t require adopting an unfamiliar philosophy. We just need to again celebrate both sides of the American character. And what better time to do that than the Fourth of July?

William R. Rice is the secretary of Brewer-based Food and Medicine, which will co-host a celebration on the Fourth of July beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the Solidarity Center, 20 Ivers Street, Brewer. For more information, call 989-5860 or visit www.foodandmedicine.org.