Today is my last Fourth of July in the United States of America for a long time.
I love this day.
This concept that governments are here to give us the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—with our consent—and that they lose this consent if the government deviates from its charge for its own selfish means, was a new concept emerging during the enlightenment in strict resistance to established norms.
Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia in 1687 for the first time and what was formerly conjecture and supposition became concrete fact with concrete reasoning.
The whole western world could suddenly apply this method not only to scientific observation but to any philosophical quandary: what are the ingredients that make up a government?
What gives a person authority?
Is it God, establishing over the people an unquestionable master with unending power, or do the essential needs of the people create that authority?
And if the essential needs are not addressed, is it not a sham authority?
That the people themselves have the immediate right to alter or to abolish that government is even more radical.
Think about the French Revolution, taking place just thirteen years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence.
We accomplished our revolution through our legal channels and declared war with England. We received international support from France, the very government about to topple a decade later.
If France supported our revolution, was it not saying, in a roundabout way, that the people’s needs come first?
It really wasn’t; it just wanted a chance to smite its enemy and gain trading partners. But the people watched our revolution and noted our reasons, and they saw their own needs unmet after France suffered financially from helping us, among other extravagances.
And they went about revolution in an entirely different manner, beheading rulers and families and children in the name of liberty.
This potential for savagery lives inside all of us. We could tip either way, depending on our circumstances and our conscience and that of those around us.
Revolution comes after a long and dark hardship, which can either nurture our potential for justice or our potential for vengeance.
We must choose for ourselves.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are more disposed to suffer those evils which are sufferable than to rise up and abolish our own government. That it is prudent to keep suffering.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
And the way we go about throwing off that government will prove the type of nation we can be in the future, because a nation is no stronger than its people, and people are no stronger than their principles compel them to be.
Happy Independence Day. In the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln:
“Be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes.”
