A Final Thought: The Fourth of July
By Mitch Allen
The Fourth of July is my favorite holiday. It’s pure celebration without any kind of moral obligation attached to it. Contrarily, while grilling out on Memorial Day, we should be thinking about all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. On Labor Day, we should be honoring all of the hardworking men and women who built (and continue to build) this great nation.
Thanksgiving comes with the inherent command to be thankful for what we have. That, and to eat turkey. No one likes turkey, which is why we serve it only one day a year.
Christmas and Easter—if you do them as they were originally intended—exist to honor the birth, death and resurrection of the savior of all humankind. That’s pretty heavy, which is why most people prefer to honor Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
If it weren’t so cold I’d probably like New Year’s Day, too. It offers hope and a fresh perspective. That, and it always falls on the same day every year. It doesn’t bounce around like Thanksgiving, Easter and all those Monday holidays. Christmas is that way, too, as is Independence Day. The Fourth of July always falls on the fourth of July, and all we are asked to do is pause to celebrate the birth of our nation.
John Adams said it so well in a July 3 letter to his wife Abigail. He was referring to July 2, the day of the vote for independence, but we now celebrate the day it was officially adopted two days later. Adams wrote of Independence Day:
“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews [shows], Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
“You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. -- I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. -- Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory...”
My late father agreed with Adams’ call for celebration, though he used to caution: “If you drink a fifth on the Fourth, you may not come forth on the fifth.”
On a more serious note, the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson at age 33, states that people should be free, so when a nation’s ruler is an oppressive jerk, it’s okay to leave that nation and start a new one. The bulk of the rest of the document is simply a list of reasons why King George III was just such an oppressive jerk. In Jefferson’s first draft, he even condemned slavery—calling it “piratical warfare,” “execrable commerce” and an “assemblage of horrors”—and blamed King George for bringing the institution to the colonies. He wrote:
“[George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & 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.”
The committee quickly deleted this section, however, and Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, later told us why:
“[The passage was] struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Of course, leaving the issue unresolved set the stage for the Civil War.
Yes, 246 years later our nation is still divided politically and we are certainly not yet a perfect union. But it’s important to remember that our ideals are perfect. All the rest of the mess is simply a democracy struggling to figure out how to live up to those perfect ideals. Every day the “self-evident” truths outlined in the Declaration of Independence are being applied to more and more people and in more and more corners of our lives. And in spite of the current ills of the day (of which there are many), I’m convinced further unimaginable freedoms await future generations of Americans thanks not to the flawed men who signed the Declaration of Independence, but to the ideals they set forth within it.