On the Third of July
Families have begun to arrive in our beach community, golden retrievers and black labs running ahead of young fathers struggling down the sidewalk with grocery and sleeping bags and pillows, mothers wearing swaddled babies, frowning as toddlers stagger forward. Miniature American flags are stuck into hanging baskets and flowerpots for the Fourth of July.
The stars and stripes ripple from several flagpoles, a flag now so burdened with polarized symbolism that you don't know what message it intends.
Barreling toward tyranny
This is not the first Fourth of July that has been difficult to celebrate; 2017 was the first of those. But it is the saddest 4th of my life--so far. Fireworks and John Phillip Sousa marches seem hollow and hypocritical. What does Independence Day mean when we are experiencing direct parallels to grievances laid out in the Declaration of Independence? When immigrants are being rounded up and sent to cages in the Florida Everglades or to prisons in El Salvador or South Sudan without a chance to defend themselves? When law firms, politicians and news media are threatened and in some cases, sued or physically detained simply for doing their jobs?
A year ago we were a nation governed by Constitutional law, where every person was supposed to be equal, no one was above the law and we were supposedly all striving to meet our equitable and multicultural ideals. We are suddenly a nation where the president rules by executive order and has been given criminal immunity for official acts, the Congress relinquishes its separate role and the Supreme Court interprets the plain language of the Constitution in novel ways that seem to favor the executive branch over the people.
Each outrage exhausts me, and every bright day is shaded by the knowledge that the Nazis did many of these things when they took over Germany 90 years ago. It does not seem as if most Americans understand the danger of these times, and I don't know how to show them. Fear makes us defensive. It makes us deny what should be clear to see.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...", Declaration of Independence, in Congress, July 4, 1776
That of course is just a part of the whole Declaration of Independence, which I hadn’t read since junior high school. Reading it now I am stunned by the parallels to today, and I urge you to read and judge for yourself. But these clear examples of how far we have fallen bolster my convictions. What is happening now is not normal. It is not American.
I'm not an expert on the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. For a detailed exploration of the declaration in its entirety, read Judge J. Michael Luttig’s piece for Telos.news on Substack, "The Self-Evident Truths of Freedom—and of Tyranny."
On July 4, I will be celebrating the Declaration of Independence as the heart of Americanism, a heart we simply cannot continue to break, but must keep strong.