America’s future, like its past, depends on the people

July 4, 2024. Dependence Day for the United States of America.

I know that it has been 248 years since the colonists under King George III gave the English monarch notice that the arrangement they had between themselves was finally over.

It seems that the people in the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were sick and tired of being ruled by a king. That one person who was above the law and to whom all allegiance was owed — along with exorbitant tax collections — was no longer acceptable to a people who yearned to be free.

Sooo ... they wrote the Declaration of Independence, and this 248-year old experiment in representative democracy was created. And, until this past week, we never looked back!

Today, America looks a bit different — for the first time since the Founding Fathers raised their pens and then their muskets to overthrow a monarchy that was not suited for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson — I picked some easy names for most Americans to recall, mostly because they went to high schools named after these men — and their colleagues determined that these United States would be of the people and governed by the people and for the people.

They would call it a republic which by all accounts is a democracy except in parts of this country where people make a distinction between the two so they can rationalize voting for a would-be dictator.

And so for almost 250 years we have celebrated our independence from England and our emergence onto the world scene as the leader of everyone who yearns to be free — free to decide their own destinies and free from the oppression of those bad actors who have different ideas about how people should live.

Until today.

Today we live in a different kind of country. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision this past week that there actually is one person who is “above the law” in the United States of America and thanks to a whole host of one-time patriots (those are people who believed in the Constitution enough to die for it at one time and now, not so much ) our country has taken a turn away from that which the Founding Fathers ... founded.

Today, those of us who just celebrated the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, which was written in 1776 — beyond the hot dogs and fireworks and pick-up trucks with confederate flags and bumper stickers that profess political sentiments in four letter words and uncivil syllables — have to be thinking about what this all will mean 248 years from now.

Or, more to the point, two years from now.

We all know there was a time when none of this would be happening. The guardrails of civil and constitutional society would have held — as they always had — and the people in positions of power who had to hold those lines and protect those rails would have stood up to the challenge.

All that is gone.

Instead, we are back to that time in the history of America where it will be up to the people to make the changes necessary. The documents, the oaths of office, the patriotism we grew up with and the beliefs in the value of good citizenship have seemingly all run their course. It lasted almost 250 years!

Now it is up to we the people — again.

I can say with certainty that, regardless of our political disagreements, every grandmother and grandfather alive laments the passing of this democracy before our very eyes. We all realize what is happening and how seemingly helpless we are to affect the change necessary to keep this experiment going.

We also realize that whatever America becomes over the next 20 years or so, it will have little effect on those of us who will not be here at that time.

But it will affect our children and grandchildren and those yet to come. And for that, we should lament.

We should also do whatever we can, right now, to make sure that the younger generations understand what has just happened. For it is their world that has changed — not ours. It is their country that may better resemble the time of King George than the time of American exceptionalism when every man and woman could rise to the level of their own achievements through their God-given talents.

And it is up to grandma and grandpa to make sure they understand, to teach them and to implore them — from one generation to another.

Get them out of the streets where they march for who knows what because they don’t know why. Get them into the voting booths where they must vote for who will obey the law and not those who are determined to break it. Get them out of their own little worlds where make believe sounds so much better than real life — because right now it does and it is.

Before this oldest generation moves on — as those who stormed the beaches at Normandy and through their sacrifice actually made America great can attest — we have a bit of work left to do.

We must impose on our grandchildren the knowledge of what actually made America great and the obligation they have to continue to try to make it better.

More involvement in civic responsibility, not less. More voting, not less. More knowledge, not less.

These are the simple tasks. And yet they seem so hard to do right now.

But right now is the only time we have left to fix what the courts have broken, what our politics have destroyed and what the bad actors have convinced the good people in the country to ignore.

This Dependence Day 2024 means that the American experiment is wholly dependent on the goodwill, the good action and the good intentions of Americans who want to celebrate an Independence Day 2025.

It means that all Americans must get our heads out of our tiny little worlds and focus on what lies in front of us.

Only by electing people who will obey the law and not break it for their own benefit can we start to fix our democracy. And only those whose lives will be affected — the young people who tend not to vote — can solve this problem.

Sounds a lot like the state of our union in 1776 when it was time for patriots and selfless actors to step up to the plate.

And all we have to do is vote. Vote for independence and vote for democracy as if our life as Americans depended upon it.

Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.