Independence Day celebrations on July 4th have traditionally been a time for Americans to come together and celebrate how lucky they are to enjoy the freedoms that we often take for granted. Despite numerous government intrusions on our freedoms over the past nearly 250 years, we still remain one of the freest countries on earth. But the existence of those freedoms is increasingly in doubt, as the country continues to fracture along its political fault lines.
One prominent example of that was the statement of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick about Independence Day: “Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of ‘independence’, while you enslaved our ancestors. We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all.” Talk about completely missing the point.
Independence Day is a celebration of the 13 colonies breaking away from the United Kingdom, and of the ideals for which the Founding Fathers strived. Yes, the US may have strayed far from many of those ideals, and yes, it quickly went astray from its founding principles. For one thing, the original US government under the Articles of Confederation was illegally overthrown in a bloodless coup that ushered in the government under the US Constitution. For another, President Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion, which rebelled against the US government for the very same reasons Washington and his contemporaries rebelled against the UK. And of course we can’t forget slavery, which has cursed this country from its inception.
But just because previous generations of Americans may have fallen short of the ideals which they espoused doesn’t mean that those ideals are suspect, nor that they are merely cover for “white supremacy,” nor that the positive accomplishments of those previous generations should be denigrated or erased from history. Every person is flawed, which those of us living today all too well understand. Focusing on the good accomplishments of those in the past doesn’t mean that we whitewash their faults, but neither should we whitewash their accomplishments just because those people were imperfect.
The push to erase from history the accomplishments of previous generations isn’t an attempt to right wrongs, it’s an attempt to rewrite history, to further erase from a historically illiterate populace any idea of the principles which guided its founding. That’s the only way the radical left can force its agenda on America, by ensuring that the American people are completely ignorant of and unmoored from the principles of freedom and liberty upon which this country was founded.
When you hear people like Kaepernick talk about “white supremacy,” they’re not actually referring to white supremacy as it’s commonly understood. They’re talking about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, private property, and human rights. Those principles stand in the way of a totalitarian leftist state in which the government reigns supreme, which is why American history has to be dragged through the mud. Reject attempts at revising American history and see them for what they are, a naked attempt at undoing the greatest attempt at individual freedom the world has ever known and substituting for it a system that will really show Americans what slavery is all about.