This Editorial is Suprisingly Patriotic

Written by Chad Messer

Sunday, 06 July 2008

This Editorials is Suprisingly Patriotic So, the fireworks are put away, and you have burn salve liberally applied on all of those blisters you got when you tried to light the fuse too close. There is watermelon rind drawing flies in the garbage can out back, and you’ll be just peachy if you don’t have to eat another crispy grilled hot dog until this time next year. The Independence Day holiday has come and gone, and I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that not a lot of thought was spent on what the holiday really means to the United States, or at least what it should mean.

When we, meaning we Americans, celebrate the 4th of July, we all too often treat it as a day to cook out on the grill, get together with friends and family, and eventually watch a series of controlled explosions jettisoned into the air. We hardly ever realize the significance of having an “independence” day in the first place, and whether or not we are truly independent of anything at all any more.

See, here’s the deal. Sometimes we as Americans don’t realize how good we’ve got it. We live in a land where we have a great deal of leeway in how we get to live our lives, and our leaders are (mostly) elected by us and are (sometimes) accountable for their actions. Most of us get many television channels and broadband internet access, and our bellies aren’t bloated by malnutrition and famine. (They’re bloated because we are lazy and eat too much bad stuff, but that’s another column for another day).

If you were to take a tour through what is condescendingly called the “third world”, you would see virtually nothing that would remind you of your home here in the States. People are starving because their leaders hoard food inside their palaces. Roads are not passable because there is no infrastructure to make sure that local citizens can get the help that they need. People are not allowed to express themselves, or worship how they choose, or oppose their conditions, for fear of mistreatment or death.

Take Iraq, for example. No matter your politics or your view of the “war on terror”, one cannot dispute the fact that for the average citizen under Saddam Hussein, life could be pretty miserable. Currently, the life for the average Iraqi citizen is still pretty miserable. But while our troops are over there fighting for a thousand different special interests, one of those interests is more special than the others. That is the hope that someday those Iraqi men and women will be able to have an Independence Day of their own.With every grain of sugar there must also come a grain of salt, though. For too long in this country, our (sometimes) elected officials have been gradually eroding the very notions of freedom and independence laid forth in the Constitution. They have made it so that the Executive branch of our government, once one-third partner in a three-branch system, is functioning much more like a monarchy than anything else. It has become that once a President is elected, he becomes our little Napoleonic emperor for four years. This is independence?

We remember the school time lessons that America was founded by people who were fleeing from religious persecution. That all they wanted to do was live their lives the way they saw fit, out from under the thumb of government. Now we are funding a strictly Judeo-Christian worldview with our tax dollars, and individual freedoms are squelched because of one small group’s conservative religious views. Two loving people of the same sex can’t get legally married because people in government are misinterpreting a religious document that should have no place in government to begin with. In our country, if you are a Christian, it is okay to seek legal recourse against someone who discriminates against you because of your religious affiliation. In celebration of this, a lot of the Christians in this country believe that it is perfectly acceptable for them to discriminate against anyone else who doesn’t share their beliefs, and it is not okay for those people discriminated against to fight back. This is independence?

So, in honor of Independence Day, I am calling for a new American Revolution. This one will not be fought with guns and violence, though. It will be fought with ideas. We need to stand up as individuals so that we can stand up as one. We need to decide in out hearts that we are truly independent and that we will not allow our (sometimes) elected officials to rape our freedoms anymore. We need to stand up and say that the United States needs to once again be a vital member in the world community, and not just as a military force. We need to help pull our weight so that the distance between the haves and have-nots isn’t so insurmountable for people all across the world. We need to be responsible and we need to be accountable. We need to once again be an example of a strong, compassionate superpower.

We need to be America once again, and this will not happen until we decide to make it happen.

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