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Updated: September 22, 2023 @ 4:47 am
Here we are at the Fourth of July, the most American of holidays, to celebrate the moment we declared our independence from Great Britain.
And here we are at a moment, in 2021, where different political interests have us shouting at each other, to the point that we’re getting thrown out of a public school board meeting. They had to call the cops. Over a political argument. Just this past week.
It would be easy to say that we’ve descended terribly since 1776, that we are throwing away our great founding as a nation. But that would shortchange the greatness of that founding, and it would oversimplify how that founding went down. And that would deny us a chance to reflect more seriously.
As you probably recall, the Fourth of July celebrates the adoption by the Continental Congress of the Declaration of Independence. That remains the document that best defines the idea of America — and remember, America is an idea, more than it is a physical place. Americans are not a tribe or a religion on an ethnic group. We represent an idea, and that idea is freedom and equality of opportunity.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It took unimaginable courage to take such a stand in 1776, declaring independence from the most powerful nation on earth. The signers to the declaration knew that they might be signing their own death warrants. But they did, and we are still living in the shadow of the mountain of their courage. That is to be celebrated.
At the same time, we cannot forget the political compromises that they made. They deleted a section of the Declaration that denounced the slave trade as an “assemblage of horrors,” and “war against human nature itself.” That deletion, according to Thomas Jefferson, was done to secure the support of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, but of course the contradiction between the idea of freedom and the reality of slavery was what led to the Civil War four score and seven years later. (Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is the best definition of how the inherent contradiction had to be resolved.)
The shadow of that compromise continues as well.
We should celebrate the Fourth of July, and we should marvel at the courage, and we should reflect on the idea. But we should also recognize, in our reflection, that the truth is complicated. It was complicated in 1776, and it was complicated in 1863, and it’s complicated now. And so, rather than screaming at each other, maybe we should listen, and learn, and think. Fortunately, because of the courage of the Founders, we have the opportunity to do that. But because of the political compromises they felt the need to make, and because we still need to.
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