I started the day thinking about the Fourth, thinking about what it means and why we celebrate it. And as I was thinking I realized that this day, the Fourth of July, our Independence Day, should not be a celebration of America as a nation. It should be a celebration of liberty and a celebration of those people who stood up in 1776 and told the King of England that we were free. This day is not about the United States in the year 2013, it is not a time to herald the actions of our government, or a holiday on which we should think with pride about the actions of those over us. Because the allegiance of all Americans should not be toward an all-powerful State or a group of despotic leaders – our allegiance should be toward liberty.
Allegiance to liberty is what made our United States the greatest nation in the world, it is what gave us the victory over England and its tyrannical king, and it is what empowered our founding fathers to do everything they could to enshrine our rights as humans and citizens in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Allegiance to Liberty is what sparked the fire in the souls of the Scotts and made them fight against their English oppressors, it is what made William Wallace so famed, and it is what eventually gave Scotland the victory.
I love my nation – what it was when it was founded and what it used to stand for. Yet I do not love my nation as it is today. I am ashamed of its actions, of its weakness and its pride. We think we are free – but we aren’t. With every year that has passed more of our freedoms have been taken away – the right to complete privacy, the right to do with our education as we will, the right to knowledge of all the actions of our government. Social Security, the requirement that all children be in school if they are under 18, the ease with which our foremost leaders use their power to cover their wicked actions, the mandate that all citizens have health insurance, and so many, many more standards have been and are stripping away from us the fundamental rights that we once had. We must not accept our present condition because it is what we know. We must not be passive and let others trample us. We must stand for our basic rights, our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We cannot look only to the rights we do have and be content. For once liberty is gone, we are lost as a nation.
I rarely, if ever, post about politics on my blog as politics are not the focus here. Yet they are a huge part of my life, and I wanted to write this post as this is what is on my mind, especially today. Whether you are a Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, or of any other party, if you are an American then you must stand for liberty. Love of liberty is what makes us American and sets us apart and above all other nations as the greatest nation in the world. We cannot, we must not abandon that.
“Our attachment to no nation upon earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson
