Independence Day is a day set aside to remember the greatness of our cause, the truth in which our founding was rooted, and the sacrifice required to first secure independence and second to preserve it.
This July 4, our cause is under attack from the virus of ignorance, a condition that has given the opponents of freedom an opportunity to bastardize our systems and strip us of our freedoms. Many of our fellow citizens do not know the freedoms intended for each one of us by the founding fathers, and more than that, they do not understand the power of the freedoms they were granted.
Today, feeding on this ignorance, we have a government that seeks not to empower the its citizens, rather it seeks out every opportunity to control the affairs of the people – even going so far as to create many of those opportunities on its own. We look around at the current state of our government and see failure stamped on nearly everything it does. With the exception of the military and few other institutions, our government is comprised of departments, bureaus, and groups whose very charter runs counter to the actual incentives of those working there. For example, if the institutions established to fight the fictitious war on poverty were ever successful, they would be putting themselves out of a job, and we know they are not going to do that. The incentives of such a structure are so backwards that the word ‘success’ has to be blacked-out of the dictionary in those offices.
Today, we have too many people seeking to use the government and our institutions as a means to accumulate power and wealth. Our founders intended for the government to be anything but a place for that. They created a system where wealth and prosperity sprung forth from the empowerment of individuals to take hold of their natural rights, not a system where a person’s rights are anything a bureaucrat says they are.
Seeing past the doom and gloom fostered by the policies and practices of our current government, today must be a day of optimism and hope about our future.
As the fireworks burst over our spacious skies tonight, look to them as a source of inspiration and as a reminder of what we still have. Though the system is under attack, the greatest governmental framework ever devised still exists for us to reignite. Our nation is still blessed with the tools, the spirit, and the resources necessary to begin anew.
As the flag waves in the background, take pride in what it stands for and what we will make of things to come. Its broad stripes and bright stars have come through the worst in the past to stand as a beacon for the strength of our truth, and it will once more.
Finally, as the words of “God Bless America” are sung, let us make those words our prayer. It was the hand of Providence that guided our founders on this day in 1776, and it is the hand of Providence that we need today to stand beside us, and guide us, thru the night, with a light from above.
Happy Independence Day.
