No podcast today, but as I sit here on my back patio on a beautiful July evening (thanks, Hurricane Arthur) listening to a baseball game with a cold beer by my side, I am struck by a very rare desire to write.
As I hear fireworks going off all around me, which I can occasionally see peeking over the tops of the trees and the other townhouses surrounding mine, I can’t help but be struck by John Adams’ words in the letter he wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776. John had, just the day before, voted along with a majority of the Continental Congress for the United States to declare independence from England. He believed that, for as long as the United States existed:
The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it 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. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.
We ended up celebrating as Adams envisioned on July 4 rather than July 2 because July 4 was the date that the official document of the Declaration of Independence was ratified by the Continental Congress. Notice, however, the sacrifice that Adams acknowledged would be necessary. After all, he and the other 55 men who signed that document had “pledge(d) to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” In signing that document they knew that they would have to fight a brutal war on their own home soil against the world’s most powerful army in order to gain the independence that they sought, and that they would be hanged as traitors to the crown if they failed in their pursuit. By the simple act of signing the Declaration of Independence they were putting their lives on the line, but they knew that, as Adams said, the ends would be worth the means required to gain independence.
And what was gained? It was far from the simple act of separating the United States from England. The Declaration of Independence was a document unlike any other in human history. (Pause here to take a few minutes to read it. Every American should do so regularly. Here’s a link. I’ll wait.) In no other founding or governing document had the ideas that humans are naturally free, that the purpose of government is to protect and preserve freedom, or that the people have the right to alter or abolish a government that fails in that function been written. Think about this for a moment: in our founding document, the Founders said that the people have the right to alter or abolish a government that did not secure our natural rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This was a truly revolutionary idea, and one that has inspired freedom movements around the world since.
As I sit here 238 years later, I can’t help but look at our Founders’ words and wonder if it may be time to alter or abolish the government that they gave us. Don’t get me wrong on this; it’s not the Founders’ fault. Benjamin Franklin famously said that they had given us a Republic, “if you can keep it.” Have we kept it? Well, brave American men and women have fought in places like Yorktown, Baltimore Harbor, San Antonio, Gettysburg, Manila, Bellau Wood, Normandy, Pusan, Da Nang, Fallujah, and Kabul to protect the homeland and keep the nation that the Founders created safe and intact. But that doesn’t answer the question as to whether we have kept the Republic. More importantly, are we a nation that can still celebrate independence? Are we even a nation in which independence is viewed in a positive light?
It’s easy to look at the government and our elected leaders and say that we have squandered the sacrifices of the Founders. We have an out of control federal government, with leaders who do not view us as sovereign beings but as subjects, votes, or dependents. We have an NSA that, under the guise of keeping us safe, spies on us, collects our cell phone records, text messages, and other internet activities. We have a $17 trillion federal debt, larger than the annual economic output of the entire nation. And we have a President who, when he does not get his way with the elected leaders in Congress, declares upon himself the power to go it alone and use Executive Action unimagined by the Founders, who were declaring independence from a Monarch who claimed power for himself to impose upon the American colonies.
We the People can blame the problems on the government, or politicians, or lobbyists, or whoever we choose to blame, but look around you. Food stamp, disability, and other welfare programs are at all time high enrollments. As much as half the country has been up in arms over the idea that an employer can choose which benefits he will confer upon his employees, and the same people have demanded a “right” to birth control. In fact, if you ask many of your fellow citizens, many would view things like housing, running water, high speed internet access, health care, and a job as a human right. That is far from what the Founders fought so hard and sacrificed so much for. The only rights they saw were those of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Much of the problem is with the way that our fellow citizens view the Founders. No, they were not perfect. No, America is not and never has been perfect. But compared to everywhere else on the planet, America as it was founded is as close as it gets. But too many of our fellow citizens view the Founders as nothing but old dead white slaveholding men. Yes, they were flawed. Yes, they did have some beliefs that we know today separated their ideas from their own lives. But if you look at the ideas of America’s founding, if applied all people can be freer, happier, and more prosperous.
Unfortunately, that’s not how many of our fellow citizens view the ideas of our Founding either. A couple of years ago I heard PMSNBC host Melitha Harrith Hyphen Perry say that the right to life doesn’t really exist without a right to free health care for all, and the right to pursue happiness doesn’t really exist without basic “human rights” like housing, food, and, in today’s society, internet. Apparently the right to liberty doesn’t exist for those who would be forced to pay for these supposed rights. The amazing thing about this line of thinking is that we have even more opportunity to be free now thanks to modern technology. We no longer have to spend hours a day simply staying alive. We can go to a local grocery store to buy our food rather than having to hunt it ourselves. Machines do our laundry and dishes. We live longer thanks to modern medicine. We can spend more of our time and energy pursuing happiness because we no longer have to spend so much time and energy simply staying alive. I cringe to think what the Melitha Harrith Hyphen Perrys of the 1770s would have demanded of their fellow citizens.
Unfortunately, as long as this line of thinking is prevalent in America, we cannot return to the ideals of our Founding. If the very ideas in the Declaration of Independence are being twisted to foster dependence, do we really have a chance to still have a free nation? Unfortunately, probably not. But for now we do still have the ability to choose our leaders. The best we can do is to turn out and VOTE for new leaders who really do want to shrink government, expand individual liberty, and get us closer to the ideals of the Founding again. Unfortunately, the dependents are doing the same, so we must work even harder to overcome them.
So what if we can’t get America back to the ideals of the Founding? I for one do not view the United States of America as a piece of land. I view our nation as the ideas upon which this nation declared independence from England. Nations, governments, and countries have proven to be temporary throughout all of human history. Even the greatest nations and empires have declined. The same is currently happening to the United States. But ideas never die. If the United States as it currently exists ceases to be free (and as I said above we can make the case that this is already the case), my heart and my mind will be wherever I can live freely under the ideas that were written 238 years ago today. The ideas matter to me, and as long as I live I will have eternal devotion to the ideas of the Founding of the United States of America. So for now, we still have time to alter our government. Unfortunately, if we do not drastically alter it soon I worry that it will be abolished for us by a more tyrannical government that was not founded on the American ideals.
