The Independence Day post

It comes along just days after what, from a number-of-months standpoint, is the midpoint of the year. It insists on being celebrated outdoors, with grill food, near water, if possible. Fireworks and patriotic music ought to be part of the mix as well.

It's still worth celebrating, even though the sociocultural landscape, as well as the political scene, is bleak. Immutable principles, as is stressed repeatedly at LITD, remain so by definition even if their application is hard to find.

It's interesting that the country from which the colonies had to do their breaking was Britain, given that Britain had more to do with the development of the idea that a society could be established on the principle of maximized freedom than any other nation-state in history. The big leaps forward, such as the Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights drafted upon the collapse of James II's rule, and the works of John Locke, came from there.

And British society at the time separation fervor was spiking in the colonies was incredibly culturally and intellectually rich. Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, George Whitefield and John Wesley were all active then.

And George III was in a lot of ways an unlikely tyrant. He was devout in his faith life, a patron of the arts, and interested in the sciences. He really didn't focus on the American colonies a great deal until he was made aware of resistance to the various newly imposed forms of taxation and British disregard for colonial legislative bodies.

But by the 1770s, a few generations had come along in which lots of people had never been "back" to the mother country. The crown and Parliament were something of an abstraction for them.

But what they did have were those British intellectual roots. Collective memory of the milestones in the advance of freedom ran deep.

Tax policy was a top-tier issue for the Founders, as it is again in this age when Bill deBlasio speaks of plenty of money in the wrong hands.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted weeks before the US Declaration became law, speaks of life, liberty and property as fundamental rights. It's a notion that comes from Locke's Two Treatises of Government. While Jefferson decided to go with the pursuit of happiness as a specifically mentioned right, the conviction that being able to own something was core to all kinds of other freedoms was deeply ingrained in the American character.

Independence Day is a secular holiday, but it rather insists on our refecting upon our blessedness. The thought leaders among the Founders were a diverse lot in many ways. Each brought a particular facet of overall understanding of the nature of freedom and its relationship to order to the table. It led to some sharp disagreements among them. But to consider even cursorily that minds such as those of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Alexander Hamiton, John Jay, James Madison, and George Washington found each other and found sufficient common cause to draft the second and third most thunderously powerful documents (after the Holy Bible) in human history is to be awestruck in the most intense degree.

We, of course, have nothing like that today. There may be a handful of minds of the Founders' caliber in various pockets of the current post-American government - even in Congress - but none are in position of real leadership. Those posts have gone to mediocrities, charlatans, lunatics and lovers of tyranny.

And much of the 2019 post-American populace is in the position of bread-and-circuses late-period  Roman Empire citizens. If it can be bothered to contemplate such matters as what is and what cannot by definition be a right, or the relationship between the individual and the state at all, it thinks in terms of  the "right" to be"gender fluid" or the "right" to health care.  And those who may have an ever-so-slightly-deeper understanding of the matter have come to think in terms of measuring national health in terms of gross domestic product, wage growth, and stock-market averages. The yearnings of the human spirit are absent from the discussion.

It's against this backdrop that celebrating Independence Day gains its significance at this time. The principles remain, they are still practiced to some degree in some places in post-America, and we still observe some tradition.

Let's think of it as a day of possibility. It's very Late in the Day, but not completely dark. The best tribute we can pay to those who birthed this unprecedented experiment is to refuse to squander our birthright, no matter how many around us are doing exactly that.