He has refused his assent to laws. He has plundered and ravaged.
He has forbidden. He has abdicated. He has constrained.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.
He has excited domestic insurrection.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
The entire list of grievances lodged against King George III on July 4, 1776, is too long to publish in this space.
But the Declaration of Independence is more than “The Greatest Breakup Letter Ever Written,” as it’s been called.
It’s also America’s birth certificate.
More than just wishful thinking, it was a lit fuse; a startling idea that a group of people perceived as having no power to change things … were about to change things.
That Americans had the effrontery to believe they were perfectly capable of governing themselves was downright radical, and still reverberates.
Our upstart emergence has impacted the world in ways which can never be fully measured, but inarguably has been for the better.
No other country has fed, schooled and freed more people. No other nation has been better at navigating democracy’s many moving parts.
Let other countries wallow and wax nostalgic in their past glories. Our natural restlessness has never had much patience for it. No, our collective direction has always been forward, to the next thing, the next challenge, the next moonshot.
Case in point: The number of American inventions alone — from the telegraph to the light bulb to television to the internet to the polio vaccine — have catapulted humankind in ways unthinkable in 1776.
Now, a scant 250 years later, we find ourselves standing at a crossroads in a story filled with them. Yes, ours is a tale pockmarked with hypocrisy, injustice, and shortsighted and self-centered mistakes, even among the founders, but what always has set us apart is our desire to rectify, retool and reinvent ourselves in the pursuit of a perfect union.
However, if we do not stay vigilant, we run the risking of devolving into something else and stand to lose sight of how and why we came to be in the first place.
The ghosts and ruins of empires which fell prey to incompetence, greed and corruption serve to warn us to avoid their fate, and to remind us that we are a nation unlike any other in history.
Alexander Hamilton’s warning to us has not dulled with time:
“The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.
“Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy — not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected.
“When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits — despotic in his ordinary demeanor — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Our narrative borders on the miraculous. Who could have predicted that in just 250 years, we would become the richest, most powerful and influential group of people in human history?
Who could possibly have foreseen in 1776 that the British would someday be one of our staunchest friends, that we would send young Americans to help them preserve their freedom over two wars, or that troops from the U.K. would someday serve alongside us in Iraq?
George, clearly in denial that the earth beneath his throne had just shifted, would laugh at the thought.
There are tens of millions of Americans alive right now who will bear witness to our 300th anniversary.
It’s up to those of us in the here-and-now to make sure they’ll have something to celebrate.
Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Here’s a July 4, 1776, postmark | Charita Goshay
Reporting by Charita M. Goshay, Canton Repository / The Repository
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Charita M. Goshay, Canton Repository | USA TODAY Network
