Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Friday, July 04, 2008 11:48:57 AM
An unfortunate by-product of the freedoms that are so deeply rooted in American culture is that for many of us the real meaning of Independence Day has been lost amid the omnipresent flag icons, parades, andbarbecues . Cast a retrospective eye to the post-Soviet states that for the past two decades have struggled to gain their footing as autonomous members of the free world and you have a fledgling glimpse of what it's like to live under the iron hand of ruthless totalitarianism.
Or consider the civic anguish transpiring before our eyes in Zimbabwe as a dictator desperately fights to cling to the reins of his self-imposed power. Given our collective assumption that the democratic paradigm of governance has its roots in an unassailable universality, there are far too many examples of regimes that are obviously taking a course hostile to the common good.
It's against that backdrop that the American experiment, whose roots are so deeply embedded in a civic framework that guarantees our freedoms, that many of us seem to have forgotten that our unprecedented advancements weren't achieved in a vacuum. Indeed, from Bunker Hill to Gettysburg toIwo Jima, the lives of untold Americans who fought for those timeless freedoms should never be forgotten.
Independence should always be viewed within the informed historical context of what America might have become had our leaders and people capitulated when those who would challenge our freedoms were at our doorstep. Today we have a different kind of challenge, not a uniformed enemy on a conventional battlefield, but a foe with a radical, extremist ideology that seeks to destroy our very way of life. To compound the challenge, many among us don't recognize this enemy since a predicate of contemporary culture is that multiculturalism masks both good and evil and our reticence to judge permits every form of pestilence to grow among us with absolute impunity.
So as we watch the parades that celebrate our nation's independence or enjoy food with family and friends, let's not loose sight of the fact that every generation faces what appears to be unique challenges, and that the failure of any one of them to rise to the occasion might prove perilous, if not to our great Republic, to the values and principles that underwrite it.
It's the slow degradation of those principles that are arguably the most insidious threat we face, and it's clear our enemy understands this. It's because we have always understood that independence and all it means exacts a special cost that we have always prevailed. The question today is whether that cost is still deemed worthy of our blood and treasure.
May God bless you and yours on this Independence Day.