Happy Birthday, America! – Embracing the Insanity

My husband and I enjoyed a Pops concert last night on Independence Mall.

While I could blog about how wonderful–and rare–it is to get a “date” with just the two of us, today I’m reflecting on our country’s past and the men who sacrificed to give us the America we often take for granted today. We as Americans have privileges, even “rights,” that are still unheard of in many parts of the world.

I’ve always been intensely patriotic. I love our history. I love reading our Founding Fathers’ writings and learning of the sacrifices they made so that we could be free. I love patriotic music too. . . I’ll listen occasionally at home. But there’s something extra-special about sitting on the mall in front of Independence Hall, listening to a reading of the Declaration of Independence. We need to be reminded from time to time of our past and how we became a free country.

It’s amazing to listen to this document signaling the beginning of a world power which, for at least two centuries, would seek freedom (rather than oppression) for people around the globe. I just got chills sitting there, thinking back two hundred years. What was it like for those men to stand where I stood–two hundred years ago?

The oppression they must have felt from England as they sought freedom to live, work, and worship as they desired. The calculated risks they were taking for themselves, their families, their colonies in defying their king and beginning a war. . . Their writings make it obvious that they did not enter lightly into those decisions, but passionately believed the risks had to be taken.

So as the orchestra played on a gorgeous summer evening some 233 years later, I sat in front of Independence Hall, imagining the signers themselves walking these streets . . . What a different world it was. What an amazing world it became!

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. . .

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States. . .

Every time I hear the last line of the Declaration, my eyes well with tears, because these men were risking everything.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

As that line was read, the orchestra began playing contemplatively–“America the Beautiful,” and while no one was singing, I could hear the words in my mind: