posted July 4, 2008
My grandfather, Harvey Crowe, half Cherokee and half Irish, was born on the 4th of July. As a very young child, it didn’t seem at all unusual to me that everybody was celebrating his birthday. Knowing Paw Crowe as I came to know him, he probably encouraged me to believe that, and in those days I believed everything he told me.
As the years went by I came to realize that the 4th of July was something much bigger than just the celebration of Paw Crowe’s birthday, but was a national holiday set aside for celebration and fireworks, big family gatherings, lots of good food, including pies and cakes, and all kinds of fun activities and recreations.
I can’t actually recall when it settled into my mind that the purpose of the holiday was to celebrate America’s birthday, which is taken to be July 4th, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives from all 13 colonies, which declared us free and independent and no longer subject to the King of England and the English Parliament.
Even after learning that, it didn’t change my outlook toward the 4th of July. For me, it was still a day of celebration for the sake of celebration and good-time holiday fun, when the people didn’t have to go to work and all the children had to do was enjoy the festivities and play to their heart’s content.
This love of celebration for the sake of celebration, regardless of the official purpose of it, stayed with me through my teenage years and on into adulthood. To be frank, I still lean more heavily on the side of celebration than I do for the reason of it. I’d celebrate life itself if I had nothing else to celebrate.
To celebrate life needs no other purpose, because it holds every other worthwhile purpose under the sun within it, including the birth of America and the Declaration of Independence, which could never have been written without some understanding of the celebration of life.
“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…”
Those ideas suited me perfectly and justified my right to be myself regardless of how different that made me from the rest or what they thought about it. In my youth it gave me the official right to be James Dean or Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando, or any other type of rebellious person that I pleased, including me.
Of course, as I matured I began to realize that words and sentences mean different things, both to the readers and writers. Take the word ‘all.’ For me, that is the most important word in the whole Declaration. And yet, it’s obvious that the writers didn’t mean that to include slaves or women, or even everyday, ignorant, uneducated poor people that were just barely able to get by.
I owe it to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, for causing me to realize that the word and the promise is greater than the man uttering it or the people hearing it, if it’s a true unalienable right granted by God as a natural make-up within the function of man.
Except for Tom Paine himself – the most important and least appreciated and acknowledged character in the whole freedom play that was the birth of America – there has never been a greater patriot for freedom or truer rebel against injustice than Dr. King.
Paine, a Deist, who believed in a Creator but had absolutely no belief in revealed religion of any kind, opened the door to Freedom, through his publications of “Common Sense”; and Dr. King, a Baptist minister, stuck his foot in it and insisted that “all” must include the negroes. Paine had lined the people up but it took King, 187 years later, to put America’s feet to the fire and make it so.
I didn’t need anyone to explain to me the right of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That was exactly what I had been celebrating all my life, without knowing it, whether it was the 4th of July or not. But I always loved the 4th of July, even to the point of making it my wedding day, just for the extra celebration.
I suppose, because of my experiences with it, the 4th of July will always wake me up in the spirit of celebration for the feeling that just comes from being alive and free to pursue one’s happiness, wherever that might lead, as an unalienable right.
And still, there is some kind of rebellious spirit in me, or devil, if you please, that keeps me gnawing on that word ‘all’ , causing me to believe that it doesn’t just mean Americans but all members of the human race and all their nations of people, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, or else it doesn’t mean a thing.
If all people have the same unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we cannot logically or morally claim them for America alone but must accept the fact that the same rights belong to all the nations in the world.
It’s bad logic and a misunderstanding of the concept of these unalienable freedoms that has caused America to make war on other nations for the purpose of spreading freedom and democracy. Democracy is not an unalienable right. It’s a form of government. An unalienable right is the right of people to form and live under whatever government they choose. Freedom is the right of nations to be left alone by other nations desiring to change their form of government and take advantage of their resources.
If a nation of people becomes unhappy with their form of government or with their leadership, they have the same unalienable right as we did, “to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Flag pins in the lapels, hands over hearts during the playing of the National Anthem, the Pledging of Allegiance, the passing of the American Flag and the hanging of it and waving of it and parading it around, do not constitute patriotism.
Patriotism requires learning, agreeing with and defending the ideas of freedom and unalienable rights for all as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. But most of all, it requires as clear an understanding of those rights as possible, or else agreeing with them doesn’t take one far and defending them becomes impossible.
How can America defend her liberty by taking it away from another nation? If America had the true realization of what that three-letter word, “all” really meant, she wouldn’t be in the wars that she’s in and planning more of them, as it takes “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” away from them and goes against the concept of unalienable rights for “all” as declared in our Declaration of Independence.
Unless we can fit those three wonderful concepts into the word, “all”, we will never be able to understand fully the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and we’ll never get to a Declaration of Interdependence among all nations and the realization that we all need each other and can no longer afford to make war with each other if we are to continue enjoying our unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.
Since America has had such a difficult time understanding how important the word “all” is in justifying our Declaration of Independence and its design for freedom, the 4th of July might be a good time to take a closer look at those concepts of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that are at the very heart of it. Is it possible that we’ve paid too little attention to these ideas? Have we not understood them as deeply as we should, both in terms of individual freedom and universal freedom? Could they hold the keys to a better life for the common person and peace throughout the world?
Naman Crowe
namancrowe@yahoo.com
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