On independence

Don't wish me a happy Fourth of July! But we should question the concept of independence these days.

I have enough pet peeves to stock a zoo, but the one I’m going to begin with today is the tendency to wish people a Happy Fourth (of July.)

We wish people pleasantries with every holiday, but we generally use the holiday name: Happy New Year, Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and so on and so forth. We don’t say Happy January 1, Happy November 24, or Merry 25th, so why do people insist on calling the anniversary of our independence the Fourth of July? Once you get beyond our borders, the day is just another Monday around the world. (Our Canadian friends probably dread the Fourth this year because it’s the return to work from their long Canada Day weekend.) To me, it’s always been and will remain Independence Day.

The question I’m going to pose today, however, is just how independent do we wish to be? Our nation was founded because a percentage of the colonial population chafed under the high taxation and lack of representation provided by the British Crown; however, there surely was a much larger segment of colonial residents who were perfectly happy to live that way.

By the same token, there is a tiny portion of the population who would love it if the federal government dried up and blew away, but a lot more people have some connection to Uncle Sugar that they just can’t let go of. And it’s not just people who depend on those food stamps and the welfare check: they may be a government employee pushing paper or a lobbyist who’s paid to “assist” (read: dictate to) the bureaucrats in writing advantageous policy, a gentleman farmer who uses his wealth to buy farmland so he can take maximum advantage of government-sponsored crop insurance, subsidies for food, and carveouts for ethanol, or the PACs that collect money from the rubes with sob-story pitches to both enrich themselves and donate a little to the elected officials they pay to keep in office. Right now we have all of those in spades.

What we don’t seem to have is what I desire: independence with guardrails. The idea of the Constitution, and more particularly of the Bill of Rights, was that of putting guardrails on the government, telling it what it cannot do: for just a few quick examples, we have the freedom to say and write what we want and how we worship and assemble, and the government (in theory, although not in practice) can’t regulate our choice of weapons to defend ourselves against each other - or a tyrant.

Guardrails on the individual are a little more tricky. Those of a Judeo-Christian background would recognize that the Ten Commandments were some of the original guardrails, telling those who would follow the example of Eve and Adam “thou shall not” perform certain actions. That’s a root of our system of laws, but in many cases it’s not up to a government to determine whether we shall follow them. It would be a contradiction for our federal government to say a person shall have no other gods before God by establishing a religion to do just that.

Our society had provided a constant tension between the guardrails holding in civility and the people looking to push the envelope. In days of old as well as today, the youth were the rebellious ones who tested the limits of society. In my grandparents’ day, young women were scandalously drinking and smoking in public and dressing like flappers - surely people were pondering the wisdom of giving women voting rights back then. My parents’ generation was the one that launched rock ‘n roll and looked upon Elvis Presley as a godlike figure, but they were also the generation that saw legal race-based discrimination come to an end as Elvis appropriated heavily the black man’s blues.

My g-g-generation (to borrow from The Who) was the one that brought sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll into the mainstream and saw the explosion of the Information Age with cable TV and the dawn of the internet, which the Millennials have expanded on to the degree that we’ve become helpless without technology. While we fought for your right to paaaaaaaarrrty (thank you Beastie Boys) their fights have been for enhanced access to abortion and gay rights, which has made it official that our nation has crossed a moral divide, breaking through these guardrails completely. Add to that the divided enforcement of law, creating a separate system designed especially for a protected class - while George Floyd rioters walk around as free people, J6 trespassers rot in jail awaiting trial on trumped-up charges - and you can argue our guardrails are, if not destroyed, desperately in need of repair. The question is how we put the genie back into the bottle.

If you remember the premise of the 80’s television show “Family Ties,” the rebellion was one in reverse of popular culture: the hippie, counter-culture parents raised a black sheep son who espoused conservative values. The show neatly coincided with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who also presided over a nation that enjoyed a modest religious revival during that time. At some point in order to maintain our independence, our youths need to become those conservative reactionaries with a heaping helping of traditional morality thrown in. I think the side blowing out the guardrails knows this, too, which is why they’re working so hard to groom into our impressionable youth a negative, immoral message. They can read Proverbs 22:6 just as well as we can, but their way the children should go isn’t the right way.

To reverse one of my opening paragraphs, this Independence Day we have a large percentage of citizens who are happy to live as wards of the state, but a small, select percentage of the population chafes under the high taxation and lack of representation provided by the federal government. I would prefer to fight the next revolution at the ballot box rather than with bullets, but the first order of business is to teach our youth to repair those guardrails and get them back into use.

A couple weeks ago I was at a wedding at our church, the bride being a young lady who went to our church school and graduated a year or two before my wife’s daughter. She and her husband met when she went away to the college where she received her teaching degree. It was a lovely wedding, performed by our pastor, but it was a simple wedding, too. Afterward, there was a dry reception with various finger foods down the hall in the same room the young lady ate her lunches for years as a student at the school. It was nothing really showy or pretentious, but I’ll bet the wedding lasts longer than the ones where the parents spend five figures (mostly on alcohol for the reception) only to find the bride and groom were already cheating on one another before the slice of wedding cake frozen for the first anniversary was thawed out.

You see, this young lady was grounded with a moral education. It doesn’t mean she will live a perfect life, but it’s more likely she and her husband will enjoy their independence mindful of the guardrails set by their faith. As a nation, we succeeded and grew with such a spirit, and I pray it’s not too late for us to fix those things that are broken.