The resolution of independence was adopted with twelve affirmative votes and one abstention, and the colonies officially severed political ties with Great Britain. John Adams wrote to his wife on the following day and predicted that July 2 would become a great American holiday. He thought that the vote for independence would be commemorated; he did not foresee that Americans would instead celebrate Independence Day on the date when the announcement of that act was finalized.

I am apt to believe that [Independence Day] will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

Congress next turned its attention to the committee's draft of the declaration. They made a few changes in wording during several days of debate and deleted nearly a fourth of the text. The wording of the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4, 1776 and sent to the printer for publication.

On 4 July, while Trump mugs on the Mall, the marble Lincoln will maintain a dignified silence. Many have wondered what Lincoln might say if confronted by the people and events of their time. In 1914, at the beginning of the first world war, the poet Vachel Lindsay, in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, portrayed a ghostly Lincoln deploring the conflagration. But we do not have to wonder what Lincoln might say about demagogic exploitation of the Fourth of July or hypocritical displays about the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. His statements on the subject were voluminous, plain and scathing.

Here is a small sample:

To a friend, 15 August 1855:

On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal,’ a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.’ The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day – for burning fire-crackers!!!
.

More than the expropriation of Independence Day to justify slavery agitated Lincoln. A week later, on 24 August, he wrote his close friend Joshua Speed to complain about the rising anti-immigrant, nativist and super-patriotic Know Nothing party as a duplicitous mockery of the Declaration of Independence:

As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
.

As of 5 July 2016, the United States Strategic Command tracked a total of 17,852 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, including 1,419 operational satellites. However, these are just objects large enough to be tracked. As of January 2019, more than 128 million bits of debris smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in), about 900,000 pieces of debris 1–10 cm, and around 34,000 of pieces larger than 10 cm were estimated to be in orbit around the Earth. Collisions with debris have become a hazard to spacecraft; they cause damage akin to sandblasting, especially to solar panels and optics like telescopes or star trackers that cannot be covered with a ballistic Whipple shield (unless it is transparent).

Below 2,000 km (1,200 mi) Earth-altitude, pieces of debris are denser than meteoroids; most are dust from solid rocket motors, surface erosion debris like paint flakes, and frozen coolant from RORSAT (nuclear-powered satellites). For comparison, the International Space Station orbits in the 300–400 kilometres (190–250 mi) range, and the 2009 satellite collision and 2007 antisat test occurred at 800 to 900 kilometres (500 to 560 mi) altitude. The ISS has Whipple shielding; however, known debris with a collision chance over 1/10,000 are avoided by maneuvering the station.

The Kessler syndrome, a runaway chain reaction of collisions exponentially increasing the amount of debris, has been hypothesized to ensue beyond a critical density. This could affect useful polar-orbiting bands, increases the cost of protection for spacecraft missions and could destroy live satellites.