With my column coming after the 4th of July celebration, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on what the day means to Americans. Because of budget cuts, fireworks events were canceled in many cities around the area and who knows what will happen next year. I know there is a financial cost of celebrating the day, but I also know the cost if we don’t celebrate what Independence Day means. Not enough time and energy is spent on understanding what the Founding Fathers were thinking and why they spent the time creating the United States of America. Instead we tend to focus on what’s bad about government and not on how it was structured to accommodate the end result…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We live in trying times and we are watching a convulsing of changes that are playing havoc with our system of government on all levels. The unwillingness or inability of our state lawmakers to come together on behalf of the people they serve and the ever increasing debt we are creating for our grandchildren on the federal level are behaviors deviating from the course that began 234 years ago. Even the creators of our Constitution had issues with coming together while formulating the government structure we live by. The difference, however, was that they were smart and compromised their ideas for the betterment of the people. It has been described that our form of government is a democratic republic which is a representative form of government. The people elect the representatives who are working for us and run the government. The founding fathers wanted to limit the power of a national government because the liberty we won in the Revolutionary war is best secured by local and state governments. They wanted to limit the power of the president so he didn’t become another King. In other words, it was to be one state, one vote in order to have equal representation among the states.
The 4th of July is a very important day in the history of America and it should continue to be celebrated in a way that would make Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison and the rest, proud and gratified that what they accomplished in 1776 is appreciated from generation to generation. John Adams wrote a note to his wife Abigail about future Independence Day celebrations: “July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe 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…from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever more. 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…I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth the means and that posterity will triumph in that days’ transaction…”
We should make it a point to continue to celebrate America’s freedoms and reignite the passion that will nurture, sustain and protect them for generations to come. We must avoid the decay we are seeing in government around us. As the British historian Edward Gibbon noted in the “Decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, Rome decayed from within as its citizens no longer cared; they became apathetic and complacent.
Although we are a nation in upheaval, a nation arguing about everything from the recently passed health care bill to trying to interpret the legal rights of assembly and the right to bear arms, the voices of Americans continue to ring out in an attempt to remind lawmakers of their responsibilities. The passion of Americans today rivals the passion of the founding fathers while in their quest to build a government that works, although not perfectly, but one that works better than any government in history that protects our rights and prevents tyranny. Our celebrations should be our thank you to all those who started us on our journey.
Please email your comments about this and other issues: lkoelling@fostercity.org.
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