{"id":716,"date":"2009-07-03T13:55:55","date_gmt":"2009-07-03T11:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=716"},"modified":"2009-07-03T13:55:55","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T11:55:55","slug":"happy-forthcoming-4th-of-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=716","title":{"rendered":"Happy (forthcoming) 4th of July"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AmericanSince America is celebrating her birthday a day early, let’s do the same.\u00a0 Happy 233rd birthday, America!\u00a0 You’re this<\/strong> many fingers old.\u00a0 But a mere twenty-one months earlier, even George Washington didn’t think much about the idea of seceding from Britain.\u00a0 In a letter to British Captain Robert Mackenzie he wrote on October 9, 1774 of independence:<\/p>\n

\u201c…that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not that Washington was content with the way things were, but the differences had not yet risen to the point where he felt they were irreconcilable.\u00a0\u00a0 The Powell doctrine didn’t exist back then.\u00a0 The founders entered into a war not knowing whether they could win it.\u00a0 England’s soldiers were far from home, however, and France was looking for new ways to stick a finger in the King’s eye.\u00a0 Perhaps fortune and geography favored the foolish, and yet here we are.\u00a0 Why did they fight?\u00a0 Perhaps they felt it was simply the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

It is often said that America’s revolution was one of ideas and not merely one of force.\u00a0 Those ideas had strong ideological grounding from the likes of John Locke, upon whom Jefferson based the preface of the Declaration of Independence.\u00a0 It was he who wrote that man was entitled to life, liberty, and property.<\/p>\n

The real revolution did not end in 1781, however.\u00a0 It continues today as our country struggles through recession.\u00a0 Back then, the idea that we could ruin the entire world through global warming or nuclear war would have been considered laughable, and yet today it is understood by all but the most foolish.\u00a0 Back then black men counted\u00a0 as property, as did women and children.\u00a0 Today a black man is president, and America’s voice to the rest of the world is a woman.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the next revolution lies in the orthodoxy of economics; the idea that production can sustain us.\u00a0 If production sustains us at the cost of the environment, it does so at the cost of our children.\u00a0 How we value the earth and future generations is something our current model does so poorly, that to this day coal production destroys land and pollutes the air.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the next revolution will be how we as a world community live together.\u00a0 Although Roosevelt and Truman worked to form the United Nations in 1945, the institution has done a poor job at preventing wanton attacks on civilians, despotism, and adventurism.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the next revolution is yet within America, on how we govern ourselves.\u00a0 As I look at the fiasco that faces the people of California I wonder what it will take to undo the tyranny of the minority of people who are unable to cope with the simple notion that you get what you pay for.\u00a0 If government requires the consent of the governed, which is really what King George III lost, doesn’t it also require at least some amount of common ground?\u00a0 Where is that common ground today?\u00a0 This is not just a challenge for politicians.\u00a0 Californians themselves must agree on what is important to fund and what is not.<\/p>\n

So Happy Birthday America!\u00a0 Now let’s get back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since America is celebrating her birthday a day early, let’s do the same.\u00a0 Happy 233rd birthday, America!\u00a0 You’re this many fingers old.\u00a0 But a mere twenty-one months earlier, even George Washington didn’t think much about the idea of seceding from Britain.\u00a0 In a letter to British Captain Robert Mackenzie he wrote on October 9, 1774 … Continue reading “Happy (forthcoming) 4th of July”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,4],"tags":[253],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity","category-politics","tag-independence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}