Stumbling Our Way To Liberty, Equality And Justice For All - Happy Fourth Of July

I, like most of you probably, don’t think about it very much.  Maybe because we don’t have to.  I get up in the morning having had a typical night’s sleep without having to worry that some authority figure was going to burst into my house and arrest me without due process.  When I flick on a light switch or turn on the faucet for a shower, I am vaguely confident the light will come on and the water will come out.  I eat my breakfast without a care in the world that it may have been produced with some unknown poisons that will make me sick.  I get in my car, put on my seatbelt and drive safely to my place of business without ever being worried that I will be randomly pulled over to “show my papers”.  In short, as long as I follow some very rudimentary rules, laws and common courtesies, my days are worry free from crime, negligence, unwarranted search and seizure or arrest by an authority power and I can pretty much go, do and eat whenever and whatever I please.  If I really think about it, I am free and enjoy, without a doubt in my mind, an unprecedented sense of independence that probably no other population of any nation before us has achieved. 

 

This freedom and independence is, upon further reflection, certainly one of the things, if not THE thing, that has made our people great in terms of the freedom of thought and expression that has fostered great inventions, literature, art and a collective sense of justice that we have felt compelled to spread around the world, sometimes to our national pride and other times to a deep sense of shame and regret.  We are not perfect.

 

This coming week marks the 237^th celebration of July 4^th, 1776, a day on which some extraordinarily brave people risked everything they owned and their lives in the prescient belief that they would prevail.  The extraordinary experiment conceived in the renaissance mentality of perhaps the wisest and most learned group of individuals of all time, came together at one moment to create a framework for, perhaps, the greatest untried system of community, society and political organization of any other time in history.  Time will tell.

 

On the eve of this annual remembrance, I am bound and a bit ashamed to say that I, probably like most of you, tend not to think very much about the significance of it all.  It is dangerous for us not to remember the horror of our Civil War, the precipice upon which we found ourselves in World War II or the consequences in meddling in other people’s business in more recent conflicts.  In my own very short existence, there have been five wars including Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq.  There have also been moments that, while they cannot be categorized as war, certainly came close and involved boots on the ground, risks and consequences, including the Berlin Crisis, Grenada, the Bay of Pigs, Nicaragua and probably others that happened without our knowledge.  Liberty and freedom, to coin a phrase, are not free and require constant vigilance as well as paying attention to our own government at voting time in order to remember they were elected to serve and protect, not to posture, pontificate or profit.

 

This past week was an extraordinary moment in time to observe how we are still evolving as a nation and a people.  Momentous decisions were made by our supreme legal authority to manifest equality to some who have long been denied it, justice to many who are living without it and to chastise those who feel they are above it all. 

 

This is a great and good nation whose actions, many times, are self-serving, meddlesome and tragic but, on the whole, most of what we do is guided by the invisible hand of a structure and system that was devised almost 250 years ago and still seems to work in all its imperfections today.  There are many in our community who live quietly and do not talk about their service, but each of us knows who they are.  Perhaps the best way to observe the Fourth of July is to thank them for their service and their sacrifice.

 

Best wishes for a happy, safe Fourth of July and may God continue to bless America.