We Can No Longer Celebrate Our Independence. We Must Fight For It Again

The day was July 4, 1826. As John Adams lay on his deathbed in the afternoon, he uttered his final words: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” While in the literal sense, Adams was mistaken because Jefferson had died several hours earlier, in one way he was correct. The work that Jefferson completed on that very day exactly 50 years before – the work Adams helped him craft before the two became archenemies and then friends again – survived another two hundred years. Until now.

July 4, 2020, will be an Independence Day celebration like never before. In fact, it won’t be a celebration at all, but merely a commemoration of what we have lost and hopefully a reminder of what we need to fight for all over again after 244 years. It will be marked not by the grand public displays of fireworks, for those are forbidden by restrictions upon the very liberties expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but rather by the sounds of fireworks being thrown by anarchists against police – anarchists who now dictate our way of life as we the people continue to be locked down.

It wasn’t just the statue of Thomas Jefferson that was ripped down in Portland, Oregon. It was the foundational governing document he helped draft – the guiding light of our republic until it died 244 years later – that has been torn to shreds.

Ronald Reagan observed on July 4, 1986, as he related the story of the reuniting of Jefferson and Adams in friendship, that “the things that unite us – America’s past of which we’re so proud, our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much-loved country – these things far outweigh what little divides us.”

Well, indeed, 34 years later, we can now say with certainty that there are very few things that do not divide us, chief among them whether we are even proud of America’s past or whether we seek to uproot every last vestige of its memory.

In order to understand what we have lost and what we need to fight for again, let’s review the precious document that was signed on July 4, 1776. The product of five great men – Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson – in just the 201 words of its preamble, this founding charter of government established six inviolate principles of the morality of a just governing system – all of which have since been broken: —>