The next four months are anniversary heavy.
Before the fireworks of the begin, try with family and friends to agree on what we are celebrating, and try as well to articulate why and how we defend what our country has long been committed to on paper and for 250 years in actual and expanding practice.
While the Semiquincentennial is upon us in a month, we are also only three months and an handful of days away from the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by on the United States.
The great and the awful anniversaries are connected by that which the first proclaimed and which the second attempted to end: freedom.
The Declaration asserted the existence of “rights” of individuals that exist before any government â no matter its form â comes into being:
“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. â That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The great day of the fourth is, from beginning to end, about love of our country because our country defends our individual rights, rights inherent in the way we are formed by God and nature. While there are several ways to enumerate our natural rights, the founders of the country thought them all sufficiently important to risk everything to declare and fight for those rights. That is the core of what we celebrating next month: our freedoms.
We ought also to spend part of this celebration in reflecting on admiration for the courage of the not just those who voted “yes” on the Declaration and who would actually sign their names to it on August 2, 1776. They did the voting and the signing in the face of overwhelming odds against their success as the American colonists were choosing war with the mighty British Empire. As Justice Neil Gorsuchs recent book for children and young adults â Heroes of 1776 â made clear, the sacrifices and suffering of our founding families were extreme and their deprivations bitter during the long war that followed.
(A celebration of the day of the actual signing of the Declaration will be held on August 2 at Perry’s Victory & International Peace Memorial on the shores of Lake Erie, adjacent to the town of Put-In-Bay, . There is no more appropriate place as it was there that the Revolution announced on the 4th of July in 1776 and sealed on the 2nd was actually made enduring with the defeat of the squadron of British ships by the American Navy that effectively turned the second war with Great Britain â the War of 1812 â in Americas favor.)
That first of Americas long ran from April 19, 1775 in Lexington and Concord where the first shots were fired until September 3, 1783 when King Georges representatives signed the Treaty of Paris recognizing the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. The second war with Britain begun formally in 1812 followed decades of tensions between our country and its motherland. Real peace with the United Kingdom was not achieved until February, 17 1815 when the Treaty of Ghent was ratified by the United States Senate, and what was effectively 40 years of conflict with Great Britain came to a close, and the rights of Americans secured from foreign entities even as the long work of perfecting them for all Americans would take up more than another 150 years and encompass a vast Civil War and our entry into two world wars as well as numerous Amendments to the Constitution and federal laws t
