Pomp and Parade, Bonfires and Illuminations

(AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)

As this is being written on Thursday, July 2 America looks forward to celebrating its 250^th birthday on the Fourth of July. It’s one of the two biggest dates on the American calendar, the other being Christmas.

It might not have been so. John Adams didn’t think so. That’s because it was on July 2, 1776, and not July 4, that the Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution introduced by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia that said,

…that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States…”

It was that act of the Continental Congress that officially severed the ties with Great Britain. It was at that moment – on July 2 – that the colonists formally ceased to recognize the sovereignty of the British crown. It was, in the eyes of that crown, an act of treason.

Writing to his wife Abigail on July 3, John Adams said,

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.”

He went on to say that he imagined that July 2 would be marked with,

…Pomp and Parade… Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

He got that part right. He was just off by two days.

July 4 is the day that the Congress approved the final wording of the document written by Thomas Jefferson with edits from Congress. That document was dated July 4 and the “Pomp and Parade, Bonfires and Illuminations” that John Adams imagined have taken place on the Fourth of July ever since.

Pundits speak often of American exceptionalism and appropriately so. Because the American Revolution is, in the grand sweep, a true exception. It’s the only revolution in history to accomplish what it set out to do. While the colonists were resentful of many of the things that have propelled revolutions down through time – taxes being big among them – in the final analysis it was a set of principles, more than anything else, the drove the American colonists to revolt against Great Britain.

Those principles were indeed revolutionary. The idea was that humans are born with personal sovereignty and that individual liberty is a part of God’s creative act and not something granted at the dispensation of a monarch – an appalling idea to kings and potentates.

Most revolutions wind up replacing something bad with something worse. Examples include the French Revolution 13 years later, the Russian Revolution, the revolutions in the American hemisphere (Cuba comes to mind), and of course the Iranian Revolution.

But the American Revolution brought about a bursting forth of human liberty that built the nation that would lift more people out of poverty and free more people from servitude than any society before or since.

It wasn’t perfect. Human advancement has never been, nor will it ever be, linear. This is what the über-educated liberal elites that too often dominate our culture get wrong. They would have us all dwell on America’s (acknowledged) shortcomings, as if in the absence of perfection, nothing can have value. Today’s left fixates on America’s sins while completely ignoring its many virtues.

Among those virtues is the fact that no other nation in history has created the kind of opportunity for its citizens that Americans enjoy from birth. Maybe without specifically intending to, what the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence did was midwife a nation wherein the little guy – even the lowliest born — gets a chance.

And no, that wasn’t always true for every American. We didn’t always live up to our founding principles. On this day in 1776, many of the signers of the Declaration owned slaves. Later, even in my lifetime, we denied the opportunity implicit in the Declaration to the descendants of those slaves.

To acknowledge those sins is appropriate. But to dwell on them to the exclusion of all that redeems them denies future generations their inheritance.

The American Revolution was and is the exception among revolutions. And it created a nation that is the exception among nations.

We should indeed celebrate it with “Pomp and Parade, Bonfires and Illuminations.”

And we should challenge those who deny our greatness to show us something better.