Independence Day

In the 10+ years I’ve been writing at the Unofficial View, I have never written an Independence Day piece. I write frequently about the topic, about freedom and liberty and about infringements and encroachments by bureaucrats and elected officials on our unalienable rights as Americans. My family and friends — and others — know my viewpoint. It just never appeared to be expedient to target an article specifically at the day that officially marks the birth of our country.

Until now.

For the last several decades Democrat politicians, media news anchors and others have referred to our system of government as a democracy. Whether of malice, deceit or ignorance — willful or no — it does not matter. America is paying the price for the continued error. The riots and violence and chaos we have seen recently in the streets, the rush to upend norms and obliterate history, the sheer rage against any and all are each shouted examples of the voice of the mob. The voice of democracy.

Incoherent, insatiable, insistent, immature, inconsistent, insufferable, imbecilic thugs have taken over sections of American cities, rampaging hither and yon defacing public property, tearing down statues, wreaking havoc and mayhem wherever they go and with whomever they come in contact with, because theirs are the voices that this democracy needs to hear.

Except, we don’t have a democracy in this country. Never have. We have a representational constitutional republic. That means we have a series of laws in this United States of America and a general, societal expectation that those laws are to be followed with equal justice meted out when they are not. And that means the screeching, shouting mob, the voice of democracy, despite their passion, are expected to follow the laws, too.

The following paragraph is an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.

— https://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/congress.html

Congress scrapped that entire paragraph prior to signing the revised document on July 4th. So why would those words have been scratched through in the original? Just as today, the voice of the mob then was loud. And wrong.

Yes, it took another 80+ years (“four-score-and-seven”, to quote another famous American) and a war between brothers to end slavery in this country. But the sentiment to do so was there from the beginning. Thus lending more credence to those other words from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Happy 4th of July. Let’s make it Independence Day again.