The Fourth of July is something to make you think.
To think about the nation, how it got here and how it’s going and where it’s going and whether it’s going to last, or to last in any semblance of the great words written on the day of its birth.
Great words were the legacy of that first Fourth: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Can any nation protect all three and survive for long? Or is it bound to self-destruct? The United States of America was an experiment on that question and the question remains.
There is no guarantee of its survival. Historians believe that but for the attack on Fort Sumter, the northern states would have allowed the South to peacefully secede and create its own, separate country. Nations split and splinter all the time, and great nations decline.
The hope of our founders was that reason and a government of balanced powers could offer both justice and freedom to a nation of people. We still make school children pledge allegiance to “liberty and justice for all.” The pledge is mostly Red Scare doggerel, but this part sticks.
The founders understood human imperfection. The Declaration of Independence was a start, based on hope and belief. The men behind it tried to encapsulate those beliefs into a set of rules for governing a free people, the Constitution. They knew it was just a first draft.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration, expected a revolution in the United States every 30 years. (Jefferson’s original draft included a condemnation of slavery, which Congress later edited out.)
The founders understood that over time, the rules would need changing. Because the Greeks were smarter than feudal lords, the founders knew that human progress wasn’t assured and that new ideas would need adopting to keep the nation from sliding backwards.
So they wrote into the Constitution a rule that said that the rules could be changed. We have changed the rules 27 times and will need to again and again to ensure liberty and justice for all.
But the Fourth of July words — that all men are created equal and that God gave each one of us the right to live, to be free, and to do as we pleased — were golden. They stirred renegade princes from Europe to come to America and fight the British. The princes took those words back to their homelands and tried to build governments based on them.
Ho Chi Minh was inspired by those same words to seek independence from France for his country Vietnam. Ho did not start out as a Communist. All he wanted was for his nation to be free of France, and no longer a colony. He chose as his allies anyone who would support his cause, much as the U.S. colonials allied themselves with France against Britain.
Ho wanted what we wanted in 1776, independence and freedom. That we fought him was a monumental tragedy.
The Vietnam War came at a kind of crossroads for the nation. During it, John and Robert Kennedy were gunned down. Martin Luther King was gunned down. Malcolm X was gunned down. Fred Hampton was gunned down. Tens of thousands of American boys died for no good reason.
“The country’s gone,” wrote columnist Pete Hamill in June 1968.
But the country survives, at a new crossroads.
The crazed minions of a crackpot president attempted to overthrow the government in January. Their prosecution – and his – will serve as yet another measure of how close we come to “justice for all.”