4th of July

In the bursts of colored explosions in the sky and in the flag that we wave on this hallowed and sacred day, there is much that is hidden.

In the words that we recite and songs that we sing, we are invisibility linked to all the hearts of the country and all those who have toiled and fought before us.

The words signed and declared to the world as the codex of timeless American values in the Declaration of Independence serves as the anchor and foundation for all that we stand and strive for.

We must be remembered both for our triumphs and for our failures, just as the Founding Brothers and Sisters are invariably human. We strive for human progress just as much as we strive to make a more perfect union.

We are not perfect nor should we be expected to be. We must be seen in the light with political theory, thought, and human forces of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. They lived in a time unbridled by the crusts of the past and small steps that could lead to the future.

We cannot and must not impose 21st Century ideals to this time as it is obfuscates the context and structure of a previous space and time. We must look at this time without the expectations that it would turn out as we know it eventually would. Despite the Founders’ title as natural aristocracy or as an elitist group of individuals, we must remember them as statesmen whose thoughts about government and service ran in different streams than our own.

We toast our Founders for their willingness to fight for a novel and unique creature that had yet to exist in the world. The Declaration began this process of self-reflection as each colony would create a government all their own, most based on a formula written by John Adams.

We had yet to call our collective selves, “Americans,” but the evolutionary process would get us there, most importantly in the signing of the Constitution and the binding of our national priorities.

Let us celebrate our birthday as the descendants and progeny of the Enlightenment and the boundless experiment that our forebears began with the “shot heard ’round the world.” Both as the physical weapons that won the war and as the verbal and lyrical weapons of Enlightenment that we unleashed onto the world almost two and half centuries ago.

Independence

What began as a struggle of constitutional disagreement between the colonies and Mother Country, ended as one of the greatest political separations in human history.  We celebrate the nexus of this disagreement in the sacred founding text, The Declaration of Independence. It serves as a reminder of the restitute nature that our forebears began to plot their own course.  They exited the British Empire reluctantly and sought to found a new nation for each of their respective states. We were not unified as a nation but we were on the path toward a more perfect union:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

It is today that we thank the statesmen and political leaders of the era for the wherewithal and conviction to see this document signed and enacted in the thirteen colonies.

Flags and songs are mere flourishes against the ink and paper that started the earthquake of our national experiment; its’ words echo through the ages as a fundamental piece of American philosophy and conviction.