Summer holiday thoughts
Ever notice that spring and summer national holidays deal primarily with American liberty and citizenship?
Late May’s Memorial Day honors those citizens who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country. Mid-June’s Flag Day is a salute to the adoption in 1777 of the Stars and Stripes as the banner of our republic. Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. And the Fourth of July celebrates the revolutionary declaration in 1776 that freed the colonies from British rule and formed the United States.
But because all are rooted in distant U.S. history, they refer to times and events that aren’t very relatable to most Americans.
No one alive today can truly comprehend colonial times. The idea of entrenched European monarchies, in which bloodline royalty ruled by divine right over regimented caste systems, is so foreign as to be unfathomable. It’s nearly impossible for youngsters who view “eras” as Taylor Swift album release dates to wrap their minds around century-long time periods defined by particular human and social characteristics—none of which resemble much in their current lives.
The founding of America also seems remote from everyday reality. It’s hard to grasp starting a country from scratch, and even more difficult to imagine doing it by defying most conventional wisdom at the time regarding civilization.
Most Americans can’t recite much from the Declaration of Independence, and ignorance and apathy increases as age decreases. To the Twitter and TikTok generation, anything recorded on parchment can look hopelessly irrelevant. What could 18th century authors possibly know about the pressing issues, concerns and challenges of daily life in the 21st century?
Many times, what people do “know” is frequently framed in the fallacy of presentism—judging or interpreting past events and peoples against modern values and attitudes.
And when the two don’t comport, they resort to simplistic reconciliations that obliterate historical learning.
Rather than invest the necessary resources to try and understand the totality of antebellum life, slavery simply becomes a litmus-test sin tainting statesmen and documents.
Rather than retrace the constitutional framers’ exhaustive research of failed democracies, the Electoral College simply starts to seem “undemocratic.”
Even Memorial Day has morphed into mostly a summer kickoff holiday. Few left today have lived the horrors of our most devastating wars. Most of the rest can’t appreciate the elevated sense of honor and duty and sacrifice for principles greater than life itself that American soldiers in those wars carried into battle.
Active-duty service members who die now only represent 0.0003 percent of the population. During World War II, that percentage was 10,000 times higher. During the Civil War, it was more than 60,000 times higher.
Despite those enormous differences, and huge deficiencies in historical knowledge among youth (only 12 percent of high school students score “proficient” in American history), many colleges no longer require U.S. history in degree programs. At a time when what we need most from higher education is greater in-depth historical instruction to counter pop-culture misinformation, it’s inexplicable that the upper-academia trend is to provide less of it.
We take things like our liberty for granted; it’s easy to slip into an isolated fog focused on first-world problems. That’s why education is crucial; it disciplines our nature, so we can learn in spite of it about universal and immutable truths.
Peace is a blessing, but if it causes us to forget the necessity of national defense and preparedness, it becomes a curse. Freedom is a treasure, but if it makes us lazily forgo the responsibilities required to preserve it, it becomes a liability.
That government dependence is the opposite of liberty should be obvious. The trouble is, it often doesn’t feel that way. We can feel happy and comforted about a big government that’s giving us things we want.
But as the saying goes, a government big enough to do that is also big enough to take things away.
Many summers ago, the first Americans committed to throwing off the huge, powerful, intrusive government of England— even though it meant loss of security, risk to prosperity and a guarantee of hardship without the Empire’s safety net. They developed an innovative vision of self-government and devised a unique system to implement it.
But there was nothing easy about independence. Or settling the frontier. Or dealing with slavery. The effort to form a more perfect union was always going to be harder and riskier than remaining a British colony.
We the people chose it anyway. Polls now indicate that large percentages of Americans want less reliance on self and more on government. That’s natural, as Thomas Jefferson noted in 1788, but correctable. The whole purpose of the Constitution was, and is, to check the natural tendency of government to gain at the expense of liberty.
Our politics may be more polarized now because more people are questioning our core identity. They wishfully contradict Ben Franklin, and want to believe trading essential liberty to achieve temporary safety can be beneficial.
Trusting a massive, infringing government to solve more problems than it creates is certainly one way to think. It’s just never been the American way.