The village egg toss on the Fourth of July sings of democracy to me.

An exuberant gaggle of 100-plus people lined up for the competition. A little bit of everybody joined in, all ages, sizes and colors, with partners.

The playing field by the fire station and elementary school filled up in an overflowing line.

The price: free.

The teenage girls with us were ready to rock the egg toss. My brother-in-law and I decided to try our hand.

Under the sun, for the first time in many months, I felt lighthearted to be in a certain place and time. The draft root beer tasted good. All of us were in this thing together, no strangers here.

I had fled from Washington, D.C., to Madison, Wisconsin. Shorewood Hills by Lake Mendota was the village where my mother grew up. This was my school as a small girl. The green summer scenery looked much the same.

Thank goodness for that, after seeing what I had seen in Washington with my Capitol press pass. Covering the halls of Congress, I could not accept what was about to happen.

The Trump tax cuts for millionaires and corporations, paid for by draconian cuts to Medicaid and other social safety net services: Surely such a heartless bill could not pass the Senate.

Well, the vote was 50-50, so the bill passed when Vice President JD Vance broke the tie.

The Senate I once revered as a rookie reporter had vanished in the midnight darkness before the dawn. Giants once walked and talked on that floor.

There came a point when I couldn’t bear to watch its meek compliance with the president’s command to have the massive budget bill done by the Fourth of July.

The Senate showed few shreds of independence on Independence Day. So much for being a deliberative body with high-flown debates. So much for being a coequal check on the president.

Rather, two Republican women senators huddled with the new Senate majority leader, tall John Thune of tiny South Dakota, to make a sordid deal.

Thune hog-butchered carveouts to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s state of Alaska and gave Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins a pass to vote “no.” Collins is up for reelection in 2026.

I thought more of Murkowski. Someone tell Lisa that she’s there for the good of the nation, not just to represent a single state.

Our own gilded tech barons are making Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, who gave back libraries and museums for the greater good, look better all the time.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse put it best, forcefully: “This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene.”

Back to the egg toss. Good clean fun, a game where everyone meets as equals, from the doctors to the 6-year-olds. A yolk lands on you, but who cares? Democracy is messy.

My brother-in-law said, “We beat them,” meaning the teenagers.

“Exhilarating yet tranquil,” a friend of a friend said of Madison.

On Sunday, at the First Unitarian Society Meeting House, a Frank Lloyd Wright original, the congregation sang “This is my song,” by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius:

“My home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams.”

That’s how life is supposed to be, still.

Jamie Stiehm can be reached at JamieStiehm.com.