Know what I love about Independence Day?
Well, naturally I love revisiting the Declaration of
Independence, that exquisitely beautiful document that sets out the legal and
moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England.
I’ve written
about this before, and it never grows stale.
And I love the notion of the Founding Fathers weighing
all their options and agreeing that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment
hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His
Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and
protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and
toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and
our sacred Honor.”
Well, damn—can’t see that
happening in any political body around the world today. Can you? Certainly the
onliest pledges our Congressmorons care about are the campaign contribution variety. And
they no more possess honor of any stripe than they possess the ability to
squirt cider out of their ears.
And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly
beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally think is an oxymoron of
the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution
of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the
Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an
entirely new form of government
of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the
people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.
And beyond that—it was what software product managers
would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the
nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to
accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might
take.
(Yes, a lot of stuff has been happening in the past
decade, in all three of the branches of government. And the evil that men do
does indeed live after their terms in office or on the bench. But I have to
believe that this is more of a cha-cha than a straightforward and inexorable
march in any direction. Those Founding Fathers, man—they had soul.)
But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do
the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty
much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century
as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of
Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final
surrender.
It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not
the generals) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by
resolving, they made it so.
Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males,
or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be
represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable
governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the
actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake
in the ground and work with it. July 4th was, as they say, close
enough for government work.
And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the
thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with
tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade
floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving
sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.
The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not
one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the
Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that
was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they
could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can.
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