Month: July 2018

July 4^th is a generally more festive American holiday — with cookouts, parades, parties, and fireworks — than other patriotic holidays, such as Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

Most people forget that when the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed on or about July 4^th 1776 it was both a revolutionary and a somber occasion.  It was revolutionary in being the first political doctrine in human history to assert that the rights of the people come from God, and not the state — which made those rights natural, absolute, and “unalienable.”

But it was a somber occasion because in 1776 the odds of success in separating from England were dismal.  There was simply no way the irregular and poorly trained colonial army could prevail against the far greater number of disciplined forces of British army and navy.  Great Britain was the most powerful nation on Earth, while the 13 American colonies were disunited and relatively poor. 

While George Washington was an impressive leader, things looked grim for the Continental Army in the months following the Declaration of Independence.  In the first major engagement Washington’s army was defeated and forced to retreat by British General William Howe, who captured the prize of New York in September 1776.    

The following month in October 1776, the British defeated the Americans at the Battle of White Plains.  After that rout, the only point on Manhattan Island still held by the Americans was Fort Washington. But that didn’t last. 

In the early morning of November 15, 1776, the British were joined by German Hessian soldiers, and the Americans were completely overwhelmed — barricaded inside of Fort Washington — with the British and Hessians firing unceasingly on them.  By the time the Americans surrendered, they had lost 2,900 soldiers, nearly six times the casualties of British and Germans.   

General Washington was desperate to turn things around, and he finally led victorious campaigns in the Battle of Trenton and Princeton in December 1776 and January 1977.  But these were followed by reversals and defeat, such as at the Battle of Brandywine. And just weeks later, General Washington was once again outmaneuvered and humiliated by British General Howe, who succeeded in the ultimate symbolic victory of marching his British troops into Philadelphia in September of 1777, literally occupying what was then America’s first capital — the city of the signing of the Declaration and the seat of the Continental Congress.  

And while the British were settling in, expropriating and inhabiting the homes of wealthy Philadelphians, thirty miles away George Washington was regrouping with his sick, weary, and underfed troops in drafty tents during the cold winter of 1778 at Valley Forge.  But as fate would have it, the hardship experienced at Valley Forge was a turning point of the War for Independence, for it was here that Washington, in desperation, sought God’s intervention. 

The Diary of Nathaniel Snowden recounts the testimony of an eyewitness observer, who by chance encountered George Washington alone on his knees praying loudly in the snowy woods of Valley Forge.  Snowden’s account of Washington’s prayer at that dark hour of the revolutionary struggle depicts him as beseeching “God’s deliverance of aid for the cause of the country, humanity and the world.”  Indeed, Washington placed everything on the line for the cause as did the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, citing in the last sentence of that document that “with firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Without Washington’s leadership, unrelenting perseverance, and reliance on the Almighty, the Declaration would probably have come to naught, with subsequent and final battles in the war for independence almost certainly failing.

The Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate on July 4th, is not just what gave political birth to the United States, with its unique emphasis on limited government and the freedom for its citizens. It was the ensuing Constitution — drafted after the colonial army secured a final victory over the British at Yorktown — that provided a legal structure to implement the ideas in the Declaration in the form of a rule of law emphasizing accountability to the people.  And that is what enabled the nation to prosper like no other in human history, becoming a “shining city on a hill” — the consequence of which was an amazing ascendance from colonial poverty to global superpower in less than 200 years.

America now faces the greatest scandal of abuse of power in its history. And while times have changed in that regard, principles have not.  May this July 4th be a special time, hopefully a turning point, for Americans to demand the prosecution of corruption in government and also to renew their appreciation of accountable and limited government. 

Scott Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.

 

Every July Fourth, we enjoy Lee Greenwood’s song, “God Bless the USA.” That chorus brings many of us to tears. “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” And when we hear “I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me,” we see the veteran whose brothers did die for our freedom. But what is “America?”

There are many things that make America different from the nations in other parts of the world. But the United States has two major neighbors in North America: Canada and Mexico. Neither one of them comes to mind when anyone anywhere in the world hears the word “America.” It’s always the United States, that “shining city on the hill” Ronald Reagan spoke about as he reflected on newcomers to America.

“I know I have told before of the moment in 1630 when the tiny ship Arabella bearing settlers to the New World lay off the Massachusetts coast. To the little bank of settlers gathered on the deck John Winthrop said: “we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

Well, America became more than “a story,” or a “byword” — more than a sterile footnote in history. I have quoted John Winthrop’s words more than once on the campaign trail this year — for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining “city on a hill,” as were those long ago settlers.”

I believe that true Americans are just as committed now as they have been for the centuries that preceded us. The people on that ship in 1630 faced dangers they couldn’t know. Pioneers throughout history put their lives on the line again and again. And every buck private or SEAL Team member is ready to do the same today.

America grew out of the great hopes of people “yearning to breathe free.” Our forefathers came from countries with state religions, where disagreeing with the crown often led to a death sentence. So the United States became a unique place where certain freedoms were enshrined in a Constitution that all other laws must answer to. More than that, America is not just a place, it is an idea that lives in a place, a dream that is so important that we must state it clearly.

America rests on the idea that you can invest yourselves in making a better life, and it will not be stolen from you.

Let’s say that again. America is the idea that you can invest yourselves in making a better life, and it will not be stolen from you. People came from Europe, where the crown was absolute. Religious oppression was pervasive. And the divide between rich and poor was so incredibly wide that today’s leftists aren’t able to comprehend it. Everything depended on what family you were born into and who you knew. Your birth status determined your life status. But that wasn’t true in America.

John Jacob Astor came to America with the shirt on his back. He took a simple skill, a sharp mind, and great effort to become the first multimillionaire in America. In short, he invested himself in a better life and succeeded. So that others could do the same, our Constitution guarantees the necessary conditions for this to happen.

The First Amendment makes America attractive by preventing the government from dictating which church you go to or limiting your ability to speak your mind. But you can’t do that in England or Canada. Tommy Robinson is in prison in England for reporting on the trial of Muslim gang rapists. If you use the wrong gender pronouns in Canada, you can go to jail.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right of the individual to bear arms. While personal defense may be the most public reason, it’s clear that no government would seriously consider trying to suppress a population that has more small arms than it has. Thus, the Second Amendment secures the others.

The Fourth Amendment protects us from nosy government officials. They have to get a judge to agree that we’ve likely committed a crime before searching our stuff. And they can’t just take our things. Kings used to be able to do both. Without private property, your effort can be stolen by the government.

The Fifth Amendment prevents the government from forcing us to testify against ourselves. In short, they can pound sand if we don’t want to talk. The Star Chamber and torture aren’t allowed here.

I could go on, but the picture is clear. When the Preamble to the Constitution says that America has a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” it means it. And that sets it apart from the rest of the world. America is that shining city on a hill because the government is restricted. It can’t just do what it wants.

We can argue about how the American dream has been distorted by centuries of growing government and judicial malfeasance. All that is true. But at its heart, the American dream is alive and well, and that American dream elected Donald Trump instead of an opportunistic lefty who would have completed the “radical transformation” of America.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pushed a program called “socialism.” In fact, “socialism” is Marxism, and is based on the lie that the only way the lower classes can get ahead is if the government steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Tell that to John Jacob Astor or the millions of others who have and continue to move up the economic ladder in spite of government. As Margaret Thatcher observed, “the only problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.” Venezuela is learning that the hard way.

Instead of womb to tomb socialism that functions by confiscating the things that Americans produce, we are moving back toward that ideal of an America where you can bust your butt to make your better life, and government won’t steal it from you. At the same time, we have a system of laws that are designed to prevent others from stealing from you as well. In short, we are restoring America to what it was in the beginning. We are making America great again.

America will once again be a living idea. It is the idea that you can invest yourself in making a better life, and your efforts will not be stolen from you.

God Bless the USA.

All day, every day, we are bombarded with endless tweets, texts, articles, posts, and broadcasts.  As a nation we suffer from news fatigue.  Rightly so, many of the multitude of those sufferers lament that we might return to a time when exhaustion was gratefully shared inside the celebration of a job well done.

The fatigue we feel today is more akin to depression.

But the issues are real.  Social media replaces social interaction, and media status supplants social responsibility.   We have produced a generation who seeks glory by filming and posting the injustices that abound – too often they film standing alongside that injustice, rather than standing against it.

Across America disagreement and discussion have degenerated into destructive division.  Among the greatest of these divisions is the widening gulf between “Haves” and “Have-Nots;” those who own and labor in production, and those who demand the fruits of it.

The arguments are not new.

The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence begins with: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  That earth-shaking political statement birthed a world-leading nation.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that followed express concepts established thousands of years before in a biblical story, a story believed by many to be but myth. The equality proclaimed as self-evident in those documents comes from a story in which each of us is an image bearer of the Creator, the one from whom the writers of the Declaration of Independence claim their authority.

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

Some take that to mean privilege.  But according to that biblical story, the creation of mankind was followed immediately by that Creator’s first words to mankind: “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful…’”

“Be fruitful,” not “you deserve.”

By definition, fruitful means abundantly productive.  How is it then, that we have evolved into a country that denigrates producers as evil and proclaims victims as heroic?

Equality for all means that the ones who produce and the ones demanding of them – especially those who demand, so unreasonably, equality not in opportunity but in outcome – must equally embrace the risk of failure balanced with the incentive of success while they rightly shoulder the burden of responsibility; not just appropriate the reward.

In that world-changing document, the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers recognized as self-evident that the equality in which each of us shares precedes governments of men.  They name its source as the Creator, the one in whom we find our humanity and by whom we are granted equality.  As surely as the authors gain the authority to make their claim of equality from that Creator, so too from that Creator comes the obligation each of us bears to be fruitful…and the responsibility we bear to each other.

For those who would deny that Creator and instead trust in the theory of evolution, there is no basis for any claim of equality. For atheists, there is nothing but accidental and brief life assuredly ended by death.  As there is nothing beyond that death, neither can there ultimately be Right or Wrong, but rather only that which works.  In a world based on survival of the fittest, might makes right and to the victor belong the spoils.  “Let us eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die” is, in such a universe, no more or less right or wrong than “Let us rape, burn and pillage.”  The atheist’s definitions of Good and Evil are written not on our hearts by a loving and eternal Creator, but on crumbling parchment in vanishing ink. Genocide is no more than natural selection, and like beauty, right and wrong are only in the eyes of the beholder.

We know better.

In this broken world, if out of concern for the weak we demonize those strong enough to build, the caring ought ask themselves who then will stand for those who cannot stand for themselves?

Punishing society’s producers is a culture-killing death from within, suicide.  Those who would devour the golden egg-laying goose, be warned…not only will there be no gold, there will be no more eggs.

There is much we can debate, but two things are sure.  Firstly, the people on the other side of every discussion are, just like you, image bearers of that Creator.  Secondly, not even a mountain of golden eggs – whether produced or demanded – will buy so much as one day in Eternity, which for non-believers means, you can’t take it with you!

Mike Kirkwood has authored What if…, a collection of short works and Fathers, a novel about how we got where we are today in America.  Both are available at Amazon.com.