Independence Day

I’ve always been amazed at how Americans take their freedom and their country for granted. Being a bit of an amateur historian, I like to visit places like Jamestown and Williamsburg to experience pre-Revolution days and for a moment imagine what it was like to live in that world – a world ruled by infallible Kings who wrote the law to benefit themselves, who taxed the labor of their subjects, not to benefit those subjects, but to swell their own coffers and expand their empires.

It’s cliche now to mention that people came to America for freedom – economic and spiritual freedom - but they found it here, only by the virtue of distance and time. The further the colonists got from their King, they earned more and kept more of their own money. The more decisions they could make for themselves, without restrictions from government, the better their lives became.

In 1630, John Winthrop wrote about the promise of a new future for the world as he hopefully crossed the Atlantic towards that new beginning;

…men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like that of New England: for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us….

As the English king reached further and further into the colonies, colonists moved further inland to keep their freedom – until King George blocked their expansion at the Pre-emption Line to keep people from running ahead of his grasp – then mercilessly taxed every aspect of their lives. But that was the way of the world – there was no other system of government, until the colonists declared themselves independent.

I like Ronald Reagan’s recitation of history;

I have always believed that this land was placed here between the two great oceans by some divine plan. It was placed here to be found by a special kind of people–people who had a special love for freedom and who had the courage to uproot themselves and leave hearth and homeland and come to what in the beginning was the most undeveloped wilderness possible. We spoke a multitude of tongues–landed on this eastern shore and then went out over the mountains and the prairies and the deserts and the far Western mountains of the Pacific, building cities and towns and farms and schools and churches.

If wind, water or fire destroyed them, we built them again. And in so doing at the same time we built a new breed of human called an American–a proud, an independent and a most compassionate individual for the most part. Two hundred years ago Tom Paine, when the thirteen tiny colonies were trying to become a nation, said we have it in our power to begin the world over again….

And our forebearers did begin the world again and we became Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill”. Every nation that has thrown off the chains of tyrants, has done so using our revolution as a model. Every new Constitution has been modeled after our own. Slaves in Haiti threw out their French masters, Bolivar in South America threw out the Spaniards.

The French saw promise in our revolution, but being typically French, they screwed it up four times before they finally got it right. I remember that I saw the key to the Bastille on the wall in the entry-way of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home given to him by Lafayette as a reminder that America deserved credit for the liberation of the people of France from their own despotic king.

Americans did change the world that July 4th 231 years ago – not that we get much credit for it anymore. Maybe it’s because we ourselves call it plainly by it’s date, July 4th, instead of it’s meaning – Independence Day.

Kate republishes the Declaration of Independence, and Spanish Pundit wishes us a happy Fourth. Mike at Flopping Aces tells us what Independence Day means to him (and should for you) While Scott Malensek at Flopping Aces writes an updated Declaration. Cuban-American Marc Masferrer at Uncommon Sense pays tribute to the First Amendment. Val Prieto at Babalu Blog, also a Cuban-American, thanks America for the opportunity this country has provided. Atlas Shrug’s Pamela Geller Oshry quotes Ronald Reagan today, too.

But on a sad note, I mark the passing of a blogger – the first blogger to ever link to me. He or she is still alive and kicking, I presume, but we’ve lost some brilliant commentary from On the Radar – lost to political correctness and the lack of free speech in academia.

Borrowing from my friends at Hang Right Politics, who named their blog from Benjamin Franklin’s famous phrase; “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”  

Category: Historical, Society