Bakersfield.com

By: Heather Ijames

I enjoy all the bells and whistles of the Fourth of July. And, as I proudly watched my husband put up 6-inch plastic flags along the border of our front lawn, I noticed a neighbor driving by, slowly, and chuckling to himself while nodding his head in disbelief. 

I assumed he was chuckling at our patriotic fervor and I felt a hinge of anger welling inside. ‘What’s so funny’ I asked myself. This was about celebrating our nation’s freedom, there’s nothing funny about it. But, I suppose the whole thing is funny; funny in an ironic way. Not the plastic flags in our lawn, but rather, our freedom. 

Leisure reading for me a while back consisted of reading the Federalist Papers, and I’m grateful it was so. It is amazing how much truth can be gleaned when one goes to the source, rather than relying on a mouthpiece that purports to educate you on their version of what the source says. Case and point: US Government class in High School told me that our Founding Fathers had a distaste for all religion, thus, the addition of the First Amendment. However, the source (letters, writings, and articles written by the Founding Fathers) indicate that most of these men were men of Faith, believed in God, and only wanted church and state separated because they did not want any one religion seizing the state to make all citizens involuntary converts. They never indicated that religion, and the very mention of God, be left out of the state all together.

“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.” Declaration of Independence, July 4^th 1776. You might be more familiar with this quote in the form it is usually transcribed; with ellipses conveniently placed between the words equal and with certain unalienable Rights. It seems silly to punish a valedictorian for thanking his Creator in a graduation speech if more of us had an opportunity to be reminded that our Founding Fathers used His name in the most important document of our country. Doesn’t it? 

And religion isn’t the only part of our freedom that has become ironically funny. There are a plethora of topics on which we have availed ourselves of such an immense understanding and dissection of our freedom, that to speak of such things is, dare I say, politically incorrect. A beautiful disaster to be sure, and a paradox at heart. But, as with all paradoxes, one attribute will inevitably fail to the other. Which will win then in our American freedom? The beauty or the disaster? 

I am a person of hope. Though born timid, my hope and my faith have strengthened me. If I am fearful that my words will cause my suffering, it is a slap in the face of those who have died for less. Thus, through my words and the words of others solid in their convictions of truth, I continue to hope that the beauty of the original freedoms giving to us will trump the disaster we have made of them. Am I worried that I will offend people? No. I was laughed at for putting up flags on my lawn. People will be offended by anything. Bill Cosby said it best: “I don’t know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” 

I encourage you to read the Declaration of Independence this Fourth of July. Remember what this country is really about by reading its words that instruct us to not change the flow of things for “light and transient causes.” That “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” In other words, sometimes it’s better to let America be America, and our freedom be the freedom it has been for all these years, than to change the way this country operates to fit a smaller, but louder, agenda.