Mark Gresham | 4 JUL 2022
I wish you a Happy Fourth of July: American Independence Day.
And yet there are residents of this country who loudly declare their refusal to celebrate it this year. They are people who seem ashamed of America or even hold contempt for it, even when so many living outside of the United States are yearning to be here, desperate for liberty, freedom, and social and economic opportunities not found in their home countries.
Ours is a nation different from others. It is different because founded on the idea that all people are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as our founders stated so clearly. It has taken much time for this to play out entirely, but the dedication to this ideal, and the hard work of generations building toward it, has repeatedly been rewarded.
Ours is a nation founded upon a 246-year-old Declaration of Independence, governed under a Constitution that went into effect 233 years ago. It was last amended 30 years ago with the 27th Amendment, first proposed and passed by Congress in 1789 but not ratified until 1992.
We have the oldest written national constitution still in operation. The founders were wise enough to provide ways to change it. But we’ve also chosen wisely to amend it over time, not to overturn or eradicate its foundations.
Some people these days think that absurd. The arguments from the political far left in particular, but even from the far right as well, is that history has moved beyond us. They claim that we need to give up on the ideals of our founders. After all, they say, we’re in the 21st century, and we need to “move on.”
No, we do not. Instead, we need to return to and restore American ideals because, in this new century, we have gone far off track from them, much to our detriment.
Some argue that Alexander Hamilton could not have envisioned the society of the 21st century. To some extent, that may be true, but neither could Karl Marx.
The difference is that Marxism has repeatedly demonstrated its failures, while the uniquely American ideals of our founders repeatedly demonstrate their continued viability and human essentiality.
The American Revolution was not just a revolution of a mercantile class who did not like certain imposed taxes, but the also middle class and the poor of the time who strongly connected to the ideals of the American Revolution.
And yet those who would champion a plutocratic “Great Reset” or a progressive “New World Order” would have you believe that such American ideals are outdated and that the average citizenry does not have the comprehension to decide for or govern itself. That governance, they suggest, is for “the experts” chosen by an elite class.
That is quite the opposite of those founding American ideals.
And so, I wish you a Happy Fourth of July, Happy Independence Day, as a commemoration and reminder of those things which the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution continue to represent, this year and in years to come, lest we allow ourselves as a nation to forget. ■
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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