Without voting, there’s no liberty or equality

Last Friday, a group went to the Roundhouse and sat down to demand the governor use her bully pulpit to oppose the detainment of children caught crossing the border — several protesters were arrested and about a dozen cited. On Saturday came more protests, again opposing President Donald Trump’s harsh immigration policies.

In 2018, the state of democracy is under siege in the United States and around the world.

But this Fourth of July, however dismal headlines seem, Americans should take pride that their fellow citizens are fighting the good fight.

They are protesting policies that split families on the border and put babies behind wire fences. They are pushing Democratic party officeholders to stand up and fight a right-wing Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. They are going out every day and doing the small things, taking food to neighbors, visiting the elderly or reading to children.

They are Americans, and they refuse to give up on their country.

When the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the signers were determined to secure liberty for themselves and their descendants. War between the colonies and Great Britain already was happening; the battle had been on for more than a year.

The Declaration, then, became the formal acknowledgement of what was occurring, telling Great Britain that its rule was finished. No more kings. No more taxation without representation. No more edicts from overseas. The time had come for liberty and justice for all.

First passed on July 2, the wording of the Declaration of Independence was given final approval on July 4 — and that’s the day Americans have continued to celebrate as Independence Day.

The document became more than a fledgling nation’s announcement of its principles. The words of the Declaration, penned by Thomas Jefferson, have inspired people around the globe.

Who cannot get a chill when reading: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It was an incredible ideal, a country based on the values of equality and liberty, not the divine rights of kings or inheritance among the elites. Those principles remain out of reach, even today. Consider that slavery was part and parcel of the “free” United States. By 1804, slavery was abolished in Northern states, leaving the great Civil War to finish the job.

We have other contradictions, too, most notably the attacks on Native people, continued mistreatment of people of color and the delay in granting the right to vote to women. America as a country is both an idea and a place; the realities of that physical place do not always live up to its ideals, to be sure.

This Fourth of July, we remain embroiled in battle on foreign soil and are in conflict among ourselves at home. The state of the union is divided.

Yet, we the people have in our hands the solution.

Protest, yes. Write letters and work to influence moderate GOP senators and conservative Democratic senators, yes. But most of all, citizens must vote. The only check on a president with authoritarian tendencies is a bold, brave Congress.

Republican leaders have been too afraid of Trump’s tweets and scorn to push back. New leaders must take their place.

Conservative George Will, writing last month in the Washington Post, had this to say: “[House Speaker Paul] Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it.”

Will tells citizens to vote Democratic in the fall, not because he agrees with party principles, but because he views Trump as toxic.

“In today’s GOP,” he wrote, “which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.”

Citizens have the power if they exercise it. That is something to ponder this 242nd Independence Day.