Remembering revolutions

Posted by Jesus on July 4, 2008

What is it to remember the date of your Independence? Buried deep within the soul of every American is the desire to pay homage to a date on which something truly incredible happened. Hundreds of millions of you will wake up this morning (or this afternoon) and know that something about this day, right now, feels different. This is no ordinary summer Friday. You’ll drive down the streets in your town, looking at little caricatures of yourselves dressed in stars and stripes, smiling and nodding as if a weight had been lifted from your collective shoulders, content in the knowledge that you are a part of something great, something that has been around for a long time, something that’s important.

On July 4th, two hundred and thirty two years ago, Thomas Jefferson and a few others drafted a declaration which set the United States of America free from Great Britain. The Revolutionary War was more than a year old; its outcome was entirely unknown, yet brave soldiers such as General George Washington took the field against the colossal British Empire while mighty thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson waged a war of words. Their sole demand was liberty. Armed with concepts from such monumental works as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and John Locke’s Treatises on Government, these patriots risked their lives to demand the absolute right to govern themselves, free from tyranny, taxation, and religious restriction.

The Declaration of Independence is one of those documents that very few Americans have ever taken the time to read and understand, especially in its entirety. All of you as students in grade school learned the preamble, many of you to music, but did you then, and do you now, know what it means?

The Declaration is not a legal document, in that it does not hold any power in your nation today. It is an artifact of a time long past, when men and women knew what true liberty and true independence were; when landowners and lawyers alike would take up arms to demand that their individual right to make a living without intrusion or unrepresented taxation was respected. Independence as your forefathers imagined it has been all but lost in America today, and we here in Heaven think that’s a pretty good thing.

You see, God doesn’t much care for people who want to take care of themselves and leave others to mind their own way in the world. God does not particularly appreciate independence and liberty. God gave you free will so that Heaven wouldn’t get as crowded, but everybody knows He’s a huge proponent of absolute conformity and pure, unadulterated Communism. God likes everybody to kick everything upstairs, take only what they need from the teat of society, then return to their abodes to procreate and sing songs to Him. Muslims would be the perfect adherents if they weren’t sending their prayers off to that made up Allah dude. Moses and I pass him at least two or three times a month in our travels, and I’ve never been impressed.

Your founding fathers were not exactly God’s favorite people though. Remember, they fought partly to gain independence from the Church of England. They knew that in doing so they would be allowing any nutcase with a silly religious streak to establish their own church. Snake-charmers, Presbyterians, and Mormons popped up throughout the years, seeded by the thoughts put forth by the drafters of your Declaration of Independence. It has taken over two hundred years, but Christians are slowly getting control of every major facet of American life. Today, freedom and liberty such as was witnessed in 1776 is all but extinguished in the world, and God’s plan of conformity becomes more real with each passing day. It is like watching the final act of a beautifully-constructed opera. Everything comes full-circle: independence becomes not the right to govern yourself, but the right to choose to conform. Liberty becomes not the right to the fruits of your labor, but the right to labor for fruit. Freedom becomes not the right to practice your God-given gift of free will, but to choose to reject it in favor of compliance. It’s amazing. God really outdid Himself with you guys.

Not that any of that should diminish the impact of what your founding fathers did. If there had been no Thomas Jefferson to help throw off the shackles of servitude which bound the fledgling United States to Britain, then there would be no U.S.A. as we know it. That means Saddam Hussein would still be in power today, and I don’t think anybody wants that. In a sort of indirect way, then, we pretty much have Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and all of those other folks to thank for ridding the world of the threat of Iraq. Even today, their significance is profound.

I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say. While you’re out there celebrating firecracker day with your friends and family, take a moment and reflect on the kind of country you want America to be, and seek comfort in knowing that you have the power to enforce your views on the whole of society by gaining a majority and pressing your morality as mandatory.