July 4th, 2023 – Celebrate these United States of America!

Amid the fireworks and cookouts, Ferris wheels, cotton candy and win-a-stuffie pellet-gun booths at Lion’s Club sponsored carnivals,  amid the politicians’ speechifying, “hooray-for-our-side-doncha ever-vote-for-them-evil-bastards-agin,” amid apple pie and chit’lins, samosas, spring rolls, and empanadas, thick-steaks and veggie burgers, Let Us Remember.

Remember that 247 years ago today a group of men published a letter to a king declaring it had become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”

These particular men, who happened to be wealthy and white, wrote some powerful words:

“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Forget for the minute, those not included in the contemporary vision of these men; the vision is broader than their eighteenth century eyes could see.

These men stated a philosophy of government

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,”

And they go on –“Tyranny. . . Despotism. . .repeated injuries.” They list all the reasons for this earth-shattering declaration: 

“You’re-not-the-boss of us no more! Nanny-nanny boo hoo! If you don’t like it, go to War. Nanny-nanny boo boo!”

You can imagine the crazy Hessian King George III and his advisors reading this letter out loud with a snide toddler mocking voice:

“Oh no! He didn’t let us pass laws. . . he dissolved our Houses of Representatives. . .He taxed us too much and he didn’t even ask our permission. . . and when we complained he put troops in our houses. . .oh No!”

“Just what part of KING didn’t you understand.”

And so we went to war.

I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. We learned that the war started a year before the Declaration, April 19th, 1775. Paul Revere galloped out to warn folks in Lexington and Concord “The British are coming.” He was stopped by a redcoat patrol near where a Buttrick’s Ice Cream grew up in my youth only to fade into Minuteman Park today. William Dawes got away and delivered the warning to the “embattled farmers” of Concord, who kicked some redcoat ass.

So I was steeped in the story of the founding of this country, the battles of the Revolutionary War, Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown and the tortuous process that lead finally to our US Constitution, which begins “We the People.”

These rich land-owning white men created a pretty good government for rich land-owning white men of the eighteenth century. Then a funny thing happened. The broad expansive vision they described was taken seriously.

Oh, we’re still a very young nation. We’re a work-in-progress, for sure. The founders couldn’t agree, didn’t proscribe, just how much government we want or need. They didn’t create a blueprint for whether the locus of that government should be local or central, They identified “justice. . .domestic tranquility. . .common defense. . .general welfare. . .and blessings of liberty” as goals, but they didn’t prioritize them for us. We’re still arguing about trade-offs.

A work-in-progress.

Still, let us celebrate.

Celebrate the beginning of a grand experiment, which is, in Ben Franklin’s words, 

“A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Happy Fourth of July!