Wherefore July 4?

I just came home from the Fourth of July celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. There was a time when I would return from a lively fireworks display by the professionals and that would be it. Back to the routine. Back to relative quiet. But tonight, I notice, there seem to be an abundance, more than I can remember in the past, of such displays. The sounds, the explosions are all around me. No doubt the people are enjoying their displays as much as I enjoyed mine. But as I was sitting here on my terrace hearing the rattle and boom around me, to the left and to the right, it occurred to me that if this were 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the announcement of the unalienable rights of all human beings, the sounds I am hearing would be those of cannon and musket. What I would not hear, at least from this safe distance, would be the thud of bodies of boys dying for those rights.

I'd like to think that all the fireworks are a remembrance of those long dead boys, commanded by General Washington, and overseen by a group of flawed men who understood history and philosophy and theology and how they intermixed and gave us the Laws of Nature and Nature's God from whence human rights derive. But I fear not. Oh, yes, I saw on one of the memes that one station of another read the whole Declaration today, thus presumably proving that Americans "get it"--the essence of the document of our founding as a people, endowed by the Creator with those rights by which we pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness. But to me, these debates back and forth which focus on the accidents of the personalities of our politicians miss the real point, we are locked in a battle that will determine whether the United States makes it to its 300th year, or even, to its 250th a mere 9 years away.  Government here was created to serve the Natural Law and the rights of people under that Law, not to supersede the Natural Law and eradicate the Creator who endowed us with the rights under which this nation was founded.

When I hear that the Declaration and the Constitution, which is its critical complement, are fluid and rights are engineered not via the Natural Law but via human feeling enforced by the fiat of the powerful among us creatures, I find myself despairing.  This small oasis in the world, as close on earth to the Paradise we threw away in our first effort to grasp at being gods on our own terms, is on the edge of ruin.

Yes, many of the Founders had slaves, but they planted the seed of its destruction, the first nation to do so, less than 100 years down the road, in the very documents that constituted the country. I hear this objection to them as if the Ideas to which they strove become irrelevant when flawed human beings fail to live up to them. There is this narcissism today that we, sitting in front of our technological advancements are somehow more enlightened, better, than these White, Male, Europeans. I am trying to see how we are better. We are as vile to one another as ever was any citizen of any now long dead civilization. All truth is relative, so whether one person is living up to a good is a moving goal post, and dependent once again on the vagaries of whomever has the voice of authority and whoever trains the next generation.

We have saved ourselves from smoking (although I note young people smoking more and more for all the warnings, exhortations and bluster), but we have been killing our children for decades--a right not under the aegis of Nature's God, but the god of euphemism.

In a moment of despair, I might consider the booms of celebration I am still hearing at nearly eleven thirty, the death knell of America. But I have great faith in Nature's God, and that faith generates hope, and with Grace, hope will generate charity in the face of a world I no longer recognize.