The Glorious Fourthby Ethan BeckerSoon after Doug invited me to write a few words on Independence Day, I spent half a day assembling the ingredients for the ritual feast of the Glorious Fourth. As I was cruising the overflowing bounty of food we are lucky to enjoy for just the right comestibles, I was also ruminating on what I wanted to say about the founding of this country that I love.Our Founders, of disparate faiths, backgrounds, professions and political beliefs, managed to create what I believe was a political miracle–a revolution that actually worked and one that has served its citizens so well that the result became the greatest engine for human good in all of history.There had never been, and still has not been, any revolution greater than the concept of limited governance and that of the sovereignty of the individual over the state.
Others may have had the ideas, but the founders, the signers of what is arguably the greatest single political document of all history, got the details ever so right. Other great men created revolutions in other places that have tried to emulate the miracle of the Declaration and The Constitution and some have come close. Still, I think they always have fallen a bit short, or too often, very short. My own great, great grandfather found it necessary to exit Germany in a very great hurry for attempting to create there what had been accomplished just a few decades earlier here. It got very close a couple of centuries later.
The idea of The United States, the concept of American Exceptionalism, of the people’s sovereignty, is embodied in this incredible document that we celebrate today. It is also wonderfully impressive that it is such a short and easy read, this guiding light for our freedoms.
So, between the first burger and the first few deviled eggs and the last hot dog and the last beer, give a thought or two and a modicum of thanks to the people and the truths that the Founders held self evident, and the ideas that launched this Grand Engine that we call America.
Ethan Becker
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From the Archives: Ethan Becker on Independence Day
This essay by our good friend Ethan Becker was written back when I was editor at the old TTAK blog. I could sit down and try to write something better, but it feels like platitudes. Ethan nails it.
I was born in 1976. In fact I still have my baby blanket from the hospital emblazoned with “Born in 76”. Patriotism has been as natural for me as breathing, which is why I am so chewed up right now watching people who would tear the whole country down because we haven’t always been perfect. Unity has seen our country through worse times than this.
William Bennett referred to America as the “World’s Last Best Hope”. If we can’t save freedom here, the world is in trouble.