A Gift Worth Preserving
One More July 4th Celebration Theme
The 250th anniversary of our nation’s birth is upon us, and we are reminded of the many reasons why it is an occasion worth celebrating. The story of our revolt against tyranny and our declaration of our right to govern ourselves. Our high ideals, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Our failure at times to live up to them, and our painful but ultimately successful struggle to live up to those ideals. The many great men and women who helped get us to where we are. All of these are worth celebrating. I want to offer one more reason why we should celebrate our nation’s founding.
In 1776, the idea that we are born with “natural rights” was relatively new. The idea that the role of government was to protect those rights, rather than to dispense them, was new. We were this planet’s original experiment with these ideas, and to this day we remain its most successful. The ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence have spread, to the benefit of billions of human beings.
Think about the consequences for the world of our founding and 250-year experiment with freedom. First, there is the American character. Bold, risk-taking, entrepreneurial. Cooperative rather than seeking conquest. Structurally, we are a nation where our constitution (usually) matters, and institutions (usually) don’t buckle under pressure. When we go to excess, we tend to self-correct. Economically, we have enriched the world beyond imagination. We are more innovative than the rest of the world combined. All this and more, while welcoming generations of immigrants as new Americans.
Other nations have incorporated elements of the ideas that have made us great, but none have managed to change the world for the better as we have. And frankly, no other nation on earth is poised to do so. For now, we are the world’s beacon of freedom and opportunity. This is the place that immigrants want to come to. That leadership should give us reason to be quietly proud. And when you are told that we should change our system to be more like some other place, think about the place we hold in the world. The world cannot afford to lose its most successful experiment in freedom. We owe it to the world to continue, as we always have, to perfect it.