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A Boomer’s Journal
by Tom Amselm
As We Celebrate July 4th Can We Keep this Republic For Which Its Stands.
Happy Birthday, US of A!
In a few short days, that will be the cry, clear and loud, as loud as the fireworks in the sultry night sky, as clear as the fact that we are one of the most unusual nations ever to have graced history.
I love to read about the birth of our country. Watch the movies, see the drama’s, follow the documentaries. We know July 4 is the day called Independence Day.
How did this come about, that 13 disparate entities agreed to sever ties to the land where they had originated, that had held their allegiance for their lifetimes, knowing that what they were doing was an act of treason, punishable by death?
There was a lot of lead-up to this bold move. Good old ‘Mad King George’ III and the British Parliament had decided that these colonials were going to pay for a lot of the debt incurred by the French and Indian War which was the America’s portion of The Seven Years War that included Sweden, Austria, France, Prussia and England. They felt that they should bear the burden of keeping the French from taking over the lands they had ‘rightfully’ taken from the Native Americans. Irony? Just a bit.
However, the colonists were sorely vexed by the likes of all these taxes in the form of Acts’s… namely the Stamp, Sugar, Tea and Intolerable , starting in 1764, and the encounters of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord, the Boston Massacre. The situation was a powder keg with a lit fuse, and it was ready to blow. And blow it did, on the Fourth of July, 1776. Bang.
This war of revolution lasted until October of 1781, when British General Cornwallis said ‘enough already, you can have this,” or words to that effect. It took another two years for these 13 now-states and their former rulers to come to an agreement with at the Treaty of Paris, and still 4 more years to get to what we now have as our governing charter, The Constitution of the United States of America.
There is this great story I read in a book given to me by The Lovely Jill for Father’s Day entitled “If You Can Keep it.” According to the notes taken by Maryland delegate Dr. James McHenry, a Mrs. Powell approached Ben Franklin as the 81-year old was leaving the signing. “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A monarchy or a republic?” To which Franklin, never at a loss for words, replied, “A republic, madam… if you can keep it.”
If you can keep it. A republic, where democracy is tempered a bit by those ‘demos’, or people, choosing representatives to tend to the governing. In the newest and boldest nation to come to the world stage, there was no king, no monarchy. There was this plan, unique to history, some say divinely inspired, developed by some of the sharpest minds of the age who had studied the sharpest of earlier ages to come to their conclusions. Called ‘The Grand Experiment’. What was to become of this “nation of nation’s”, founded on an idea?
Let us consider this last. Tyranny was the reason for all the fuss, the disregard for those “certain inalienable rights’, said Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence on that fourth day of July.
Has this system saved us from tyranny?
In “If You Can Keep It”, author Eric Metaxas says that we are in a tenuous position as a nation. We have lost our way, he says. We are now a nation, conceived in liberty, of the people, self-governing, to be sure, but struggling to maintain the republic, just as Franklin feared. He notes that for self-government to work, for a republic to make it, there must be certain tenets in a society, tenets that are short in supply among our current leadership.
Alexis de Toqueville, the Frenchman who came to this new nation to study if this grand experiment was working, said that ‘liberty cannot be established without morality, without faith,’ and observed that the secret to American freedom was American virtue. One can only look at the daily news to see evidence of a decline in virtue. Metaxas refers to British social critic and writer Os Guinness, who talks about the Golden Triangle of Freedom. In it, there are the tenets that Toqueville saw in the early America. Guinness says that Freedom requires Virtue, Virtue requires Faith, and Faith requires Freedom. The Golden Triangle, as it were. These ideals were part and parcel what drove the Founding Fathers to risk their necks and further, to forge the new governing document.
How are we doing these days on self-governing? Do we see much Virtue and Faith among our leadership? Do we feel like our representatives really are in thinking of us? At any level, but especially the national level, do we feel that we are being heard, that a Senator or a Representative cares about you and I, except to get our vote so they can stay in power? Whatever happened to Reagan’s “shining city on a hill?”
Are we living under a “New Tyranny?”
I could go on. But space limits this discussion.
Just a few things to think about as we eat barbecue, get sunburned, and watch the rocket’s red glare.
