It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t start off with a dank meme.
I want to wish a Happy Independence Day to all of my fellow Americans. While today is typically filled with hot dogs and sales, I thought it’d be a good idea to take a look back and reflect upon the meaning of the day. I may have only been alive to see a tiny snippet of our history, but all of the divisions that we face today compel me to share just how fortunate we are to be the heirs of the American Revolution. It’s time to take a look back at the times of triumph and hope, but also the heartbreak and tragedy.
Let’s see where it takes us.
Lost Ink, Eternal Ideals.
If we are going to think about our nation, why not start with what we faced in the fires of revolution? On July 4, 1776, our forefathers read out a Declaration at a time when things must have seemed bleak. The Continental Army began a long retreat across the board. It seemed like the revolutionary ideal that people should be equal before the law would never make it out of its’ cradle.
But they still fought on through 1777 and into the early summer of 1778. The July 4th of that year turned everything around when France entered the war, leading to victory at Yorktown in 1781 and the peace in Paris.
I did not quite have the full grasp on the why of the American Revolution until I visited the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I soon learned that it was not necessarily about taxes or the legalese that accompanies such laws. It was about the fact that a corrupt British King (and the government that formed in his name) did not give a damn about the lives or rights of those Englishmen across the sea. Therefore, we needed to break away and start anew.
And perhaps most importantly, this knowledge came from looking at a document that did not look like the one above. Instead, it looked like this:
We would repeat the struggle for independence not a generation later in the War of 1812. As with the revolution, it appeared that everything would be lost when our former overlords occupied Washington and torched the White House. But over three bloody years, the nation survived and became even stronger because of it.
Brother Against Brother.
With the peace shattered in North America, we should reflect on how horrifying it must have been for our ancestors on July 4, 1861. In response to the election of President Abraham Lincoln, the cannons erupted that past April at Fort Sumter. Over the course of the next four years, over 365,000 American soldiers and sailors (and 290,000 on the Confederate side) would lose their lives in a civil war that ripped our nation in half and pieced it back together again.
And we were better than before. After the horrors of war, the abolition of slavery, American nationalism, and the re-affirmation of our principles laid the groundwork for our transition from a regional power to the world’s sole superpower.
Innovation, Civil Rights, And The Industrial Age.
As the nation began to heal from the war, the next chapter of American history began with innovation, capitalism, and the struggle for worker’s rights. The industrialization of the nation was not without its’ problems, but creativity and the sharing of ideas bettered the lives of our forefathers and mothers in ways that enabled the foundation of the coming Civil Rights Movements.
Wives and mothers who once had to spend all day cleaning the home could study politics because new innovations cut down on the time required to do such tasks. Unions formed because information was able to spread further and faster than ever before. People began to go on new adventures because of Henry Ford’s invention of the mass-produced automobile. And, of course, many of our fellows in the southern part of the country fought on through the disgusting stain of segregation. Each of these led to the modern ideal that every American should not be judged by arbitrary characteristics like place or race, but rather from the ideas they hold or what they do. In other words:
The World Wars.
How crushing must it have been for the oldest among us to experience July 4th, 1917? At the time, we were a non-interventionist power that wished to broker peace between nations. Europe was at war for about three years. While we managed to stay out of it, Germany engaged in a campaign unrestricted submarine warfare that sucked us into the European theater. Over the next two years, 117,000 Americans died in the trenches of Western Europe to help stop the German war machine. Yet when the guns fell silent in 1918, no one realized that it was only the first part of a longer war.
A greater generation would be called to fight on July 4th, 1942 in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. At the time, the Nazi Empire had reached its’ greatest extent and we were victorious in the Battle of Midway. Over the next three years, they fought on the beaches, the streets, the hills, and the forests with our brothers and sisters from across the free world to save the world from the cult of human misery known as fascism. Still, we paid for our everlasting with the lives of 419,000 Americans.
Communism And The Ingenuity Of A Nation.
Our fathers and mothers were reminded of an even more dangerous struggle on July 4th, 1963. The Cuban Missile Crisis made many of the barbecues and fireworks displays into a reflection of how communism and nuclear weapons nearly destroyed the world. Eastern Europe was under the Soviet boot at the time, and it seemed like we would need to pay any price in order to stop another disastrous ideology from taking over the world.
But with the help of their parents, they found a way to accomplish the impossible in the battle of ideas. Apollo 11 pushed us to look to the future. Star Wars expanded our imagination and shattered the limits of what American movies could do. And on top of it all, our shadow warriors safeguarded these marvels around the world. Warfare, too, became smaller and smaller until a wall came tumbling down, ushering in the birth to a new world.
Terrorism And Hope.
As we celebrate this July 4th, it is important to remember these sacrifices and remain vigilant against new threats to the revolution. Looking outward, we face a new battle of ideologies between Islamic terrorism and our western ideals of democratic-republicanism, secularism, and equality under the law. At home, we struggle with the battles between cultural authoritarians & the liberals and conservatives that seek to safeguard the ideals of the nation. But when you look at it through the eyes of history, it doesn’t seem so horrifying now, does it?
After all, our bravest shot Bin Laden and tore Al Qaeda to shreds. Sooner or later, we are going to rip ISIS a new asshole as well.
And at home, the Internet allows us to communicate and share things in ways that we could have never imagined. Popular culture is growing at a never before seen pace with new books, movies, music, and games always on the shelves. And above all, we can create and build new things with the help of technologies that our ancestors would have thought of as magical.
Who knew that all these good things could come from a piece of parchment over 240 years ago?
Have a wonderful day, everyone!
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