INDEPENDENCE DAY

I have spent several Independence Days in Washington, D.C., meditating at the secular shrines to the nation’s noblest hopes.  Beyond beer and bottle rockets, beneath political and social skirmishes, the city’s architecture blends Classical democratic ideals and Imperial conceits that are uniquely American.

They bear witness to the finest ideas of the Enlightenment—ideas that freed American life from the power of the English regent and freed the American soul from the tyranny of the righteous neighbor who would force us through the narrow gate of their heaven by bending us to the constraining template of their own minds. Independence Day is the powerful symbol of the American achievement in secular life and religious life: more than two centuries of liberty unknown in the world before and rare in the world still.

Current public discourse is too much shaped by angry voices from the loud religious right and the ranting Tea Party that claim the government is taking away our liberty (they mean that we have to pay a fair allotment of taxes to support social services they want to decay) while really believing that unless we think like they think, we have too much liberty. Especially if we are poor. Especially if we are from South of the Border. 

They think they know how we should live, what we should read, what our media programming should look like and sound like, even whom we should love, with whom we may live out our lives and to whom we may leave our property.

They know it all!

Voices like that are not new to our public life. They are the declarations of men and women who cherish their own privilege and their fortune of a lucky birth while fearing the threatening liberties of others.

They are loud, they have money behind them, they are organized, they are dangerous. The rest of us are fools indeed if we allow these people to control religious or secular institutions, if we allow them to appropriate for their own narrow interests the flag that represents the liberty bought by the lives of men and women who were willing to die, if necessary, so that the rest could live free.

We owe our forebears and we owe those who come after us the costly preservation of the freedoms rooted in the document whose signing marks this day.

Everyone knows the opening words to the Declaration of Independence. They ring down the years. Do you remember the closing words, which made it possible for the opening words to stand?

...for the support of this declaration, and with a firm reliance upon the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

What more could they have risked for a vision, for an idea, for liberty?