Independence Day: Joy or Sorrow?

Happy 4th of July to all American citizens, and lest I forget, happy independence day to all illegal immigrants here. After all, each one of you is enjoying the same benefits any American citizen enjoys. How can there be joy today when an entire nation lacks moral courage to warn business owners of the consequences of hiring illegal immigrants? Or how can a president invest so much of his time legalizing the illegal? Can you make sense out of that? But Independence Day is not merely sorrowful because of immigration, it is sorrowful because there is nothing to feel independent about in this nation. Our once Constitutional liberties have been misused and now we have governmental bondage. Our forefathers have become cartoon caricatures to beautify our hypocritical walls in Washington.
William Anderson tells of his experience when he visited a large Baptist Church in Georgia:

My family and I are on vacation and yesterday we attended a large Baptist church in a small Georgia town. (The local Episcopal church that we usually attend when we are visiting here had switched its service to 9 a.m., unknown to us.) The church had its pulpit decorated with American flags, and the space above the baptismal pool in the back of the chancel had a large American flag in a place where churches often place a cross. Much of the service dealt with “our freedoms” and, of course, the armed forces which ostensibly make all these “freedoms” possible.

I don’t write this to single out Baptists or anyone else. Many of the same comments will be made elsewhere, but I believe that the most instructive thing is that Americans today have come to equate freedom with the state, and with military might. Once upon a time, people equated freedom with the absence of state authority, but those days are gone.

This is a process that began post-Civil War and accelerated during the Progressive Era. Today, the nonsense continues, as we are told that the war in Iraq is being waged so that we will not be defeated by “terrorists” and have them take away our freedoms.

Somehow, had I said something to the church members about government listening in on phone calls, regulating our economic exchanges into oblivion, permitting U.S. attorneys to target anyone they please with the typical broad “conspiracy” statutes and the like, the response at best would have been a blank stare, and at worst one of great hostility.

Michael Peroutka has always said that news in American is really news from Absurdstan. Our Independence Day is our dependence on foreign oil, dependence on an abusive government, and dependence on an unknown god. So til’ next year, Happy Dependence on Government Day! Cheers!