(authors note- In the run-up to the Fourth of July national holiday weekend, we are re-posting this essay updated from 2015, calling for a true Independence Day, which appeared in our book, Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times, released c. August 15, 2016)
Why we need a true Independence Day
July 4th, 2020 will mark the 244th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. To commemorate America’s birthday, there would have been the customary parades and fireworks displays and bar-b-ques and picnics all across the land, just as there should have been.
But a virus, residing in a human, aboard an inbound flight from the Wuhan Province of China, brought what would become a worldwide pandemic to our northwest mainland. Within three weeks, it came to our largest city, aboard an inbound flight from Italy and, effectively, the American populace was hit with the same virus, on both coasts, and spread across the land within a few weeks. We suppose two oceans no longer protect us in the jet age and, in that same jet age, pandemics spread much more quickly than they ever did in the past- so quickly that they are here before we even know what hit us.
Americans- the TRUE Americans who are not swept up in the anti-Americanism that seems to be the “cause celebre du jour” that has taken hold of the political left- will no doubt find some way to celebrate America’s birthday and all for which it has stood, and still stands, today.
This is the Independence Day which most of us revere, and which most of us are familiar.
However, there is a grievous need for another type of Independence Day- a TRUE Independence Day- the type of Independence Day which will reaffirm all that has made us independent, and thereby, has guaranteed the freedoms that we all-too-often take for granted. In essence, we need an Independence Day which will revive the slumbering spirit of independence, before we finally lose this spirit.
The spirit of independence has little to do with governmental largesse. In fact, it is this same sense of governmental largesse that has come to threaten our very freedoms and sense of independence as we know it.
This spirit of independence is thwarted by the demands for welfare and the transition to a welfare state. This spirit of independence evaporates with every new user added to the growing rolls of public assistance- EBT, extended unemployment benefits, pre-retirement social security distributions attributable to growing and specious disability payments, aid for dependent mothers, and other such programs, all of which have grown exponentially in the last decade. For every person thus put on the public dole, there is one less person who is independent, and one more person who, albeit unintentionally, weakens our nation.
This spirit of independence is threatened by the growing clarion calls for universal (meaning government-provided) cradle-to-grave health care- as though good health were something that should be not only guaranteed as a right, but provided for, by right, when such an ideology does more than anything else to increase the burden on healthcare providers and take ever more earnings from those who still work for a living, by transferring their wealth to those who refuse to work for a living.
This spirit of independence is under attack by those who favor open borders, to those who believe that suffrage (the right to vote) should be extended to non-citizens who increase dependency on social programs, the cost of which is already spinning well out of control. The costs of uncontrolled and illegal immigration, when measured in terms of the crimes being perpetrated by many entering illegally through our porous southern borders, are enormous- and exponentially growing, year by year.
The spirit of independence is assaulted by those who believe that post high school education should be “free”- meaning that it should be paid for by increased corporate taxation, despite the very fact that the United States already has the very highest corporate tax rate in the entire world. The strains that this ideology places upon those who pay their own tuition, and those who must borrow money to pay for their own tuition does more than anything else, to astronomically increase the cost of education to ridiculously high levels. These costs are increasing at such an a alarming rate that we are quickly approaching the day that we will see the margins of diminishing returns apply to the demand for college education- in essence, a college education will be deemed not worthy of the costs of acquiring a college education.
It has been said that a nation in which people depend upon government for everything is a nation of servants- that to depend upon government for everything will produce a system where the people are subject to the loss of personal freedom…in essence, we become enslaved to our masters in government, who would seek to control all aspects of our lives, in exchange for the largesse they provide.
This dependence is NOT that upon which our forefathers risked their lives, their property and their sacred honor, as stated in the Declaration of Independence. They did not fight a war with Great Britain to create a nation of “suckling pigs” permanently attached to the teats of a massive “sow” that is government largesse. No, these patriots were the very expression of self-sufficiency and independence that once made this nation the greatest in the world. Yet now, those very things that made us so strong and independent are threatened, to the point of extinction, by the ever-increasing dependence on the state for everything we want, and determine to be our entitlement.
On this, the 244th anniversary of American independence, let us resolve to reincarnate a spirit of TRUE independence. Let us endeavor to revive the spirit of self-sufficiency, and reacquire the can-do determination to make for ourselves a more perfect union, without having to depend upon someone else to do this for us. Let us, as a nation, once again project a righteous indignation to persevere on, without having to depend upon a state that would seek to further enslave and constrain our desire to pursue our birthright for this day, and for all time.
-Drew Nickell, 4 July 2020
© 2015, 2020 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved
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