By Will Collette
We celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks, cookouts and
days at the beach. It’s a great holiday that drives home the point that it
really and truly is summer.
The fireworks are stand-ins for an important historical
fact: this holiday marks the day we signed the Declaration of Independence
from Great Britain,
fully committing the American people in the 13 Colonies to armed insurrection and
revolution against King George III and the British government.
It was a long, hard, bloody war. We almost lost. Indeed, many historians believe we would have certainly lost had the French not decided it was in their self-interest to back the rebellious colonists against the British.
They, along with a virtual foreign legion of adventurers and
mercenaries, bucked up the sagging American forces and helped us win our
independence and the chance to build a new society better than the old.
In the two centuries since, America has been a work in
progress. We try to make our country better, stronger, more free and more
secure with every passing generation. More often than not, we succeed with
those steady improvements.
But none of it came easily. Each major leap forward has come
at the cost of social unrest, turmoil and division.
Just as the colonial leaders who took us through the
American Revolution to independence were a lot more than a debating club, the
leaders who make a difference in America today know that change is
hard and progress carries a cost.
At every level of American society, from sleepy little Charlestown to the
highest reaches of American society, we are troubled, divided and worried. We
have short tempers, low tolerance and scant little humor. I think many, perhaps
most, of us sense we are on the verge of some great shift, some seismic event
that will either move us forward or throw us back.
This is not the first time in American history where such
feelings pervaded our society. It won’t be the last. We have weathered these
storms before, and usually benefited.
I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from a great
American patriot, Frederick Douglass, who said:
“Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want
crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and
lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The
struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both.
But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never
did and it never will.”