We visited the liberty bell. It’s not just a bell, it’s The Liberty Bell. If you bother to read the many displays where it’s on display you will find out that most of what you know about the liberty bell is wrong. It wasn’t rung on July 4, 1776. It was a big bell in a small church and the vibrations damaged the building so they stopped ringing it before the declaration of independence was signed. That giant crack isn’t the original crack. The tried to repair a hairline crack in it in the 1800s, and when they rang it to test it, the giant crack that is instantly recognizable as THE Liberty Bell appeared.
People didn’t stop visiting the liberty bell after they found out it wasn’t true. We just kept telling the original story even story even though it wasn’t true. We kept telling it because it was more than true. As Neil Gaiman says we don’t tell children fairy tales “because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” Maybe we tell stories about ringing the liberty bell so hard that it broke is because we want to teach children that standing up to tyranny is something that we should not only dare to do, but celebrate with all our might. And maybe they stood up to tyranny because they were told that dragons can be beaten.