THE DREAM AND THE BURDEN
Along with such documents as the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire is one of the most valuable and treasured documents on earth. The primary hook of the movie National Treasure was that the good guys had to steal the Declaration of Independence, which had a treasure map on the back in invisible ink. With this fascinating premise the movie was, I thought, highly entertaining.
Yet as was pointed out in the film, this is a priceless document, it cannot be given a value in dollars. Not only would you not be able to sell it anywhere, but it is so treasured and so significant in the history of the development of liberty and democracy that it just can't be given a price. The men who signed such a paper likely were not aware of any such price, all they knew is that by signing this, they were dead men; traitors to the crown, declaring themselves enemies to one of the most powerful nations on earth.
There's an email going around that supposedly gives the details of what happened to each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, with grisly details of the difficulties each faced. Most of them died, others suffered torture and loss, their homes destroyed, families fleeing for their lives.
While many of the details aren't true, we do know that each of these men faced hanging for their mere signature. To defy the king in this manner was to die, particularly the mad king George. When the British responded and war developed, most of the signers picked up a rifle and joined the continental army. 32 men signed the declaration, and from that point on their life was troubled.
For example, Thomas McKean wrote to John Adams in 1777 describing how he had been "hunted like a fox by the enemy, compelled to remove my family five times in three months, and at last fixed them in a little log-house on the banks of the Susquehanna, but they were soon obliged to move again on account of the incursions of the Indians."
The signers were known by the local militias and government, some like John Hancock were so ostentatious in their life and their signing that they practically begged attention. During the war, most of them lost property, livelihood, and even family members through the ravages of conflict. Abraham Clark had two sons captured by the British and incarcerated on the prison ship Jersey. John Witherspoon's eldest son James was killed in the Battle of Germantown in October 1777.
George Walton Thomas Heyward, Jr., Arthur Middleton, and Edward Rutledge were all captured by the British and held as prisoners of war. Had the war ended with British victory, they would have been shipped to England and hung as traitors. Richard Stockton was dragged from his bed at night by British loyalists ("Tories").
None of the signers died in the Revolutionary War, but men such as Carter Braxton lost his considerable wealth as his trade ships were sunk and captured. He was forced to sell his land holdings to pay for the debts thus incurred.
John Hancock devised a plan to remove the British forces from Boston, where his home and wealth was stored, a plan that would have through siege and bombardment destroyed the city and in particular his own home. Braxton was reluctant to face war because he wisely saw that the Colonists were inadequately prepared - particularly at sea - yet he signed and was an active participant in bringing about the conflict. John Hancock was willing to sacrifice his every last owning to fight the battle for liberty.
Yet as was pointed out in the film, this is a priceless document, it cannot be given a value in dollars. Not only would you not be able to sell it anywhere, but it is so treasured and so significant in the history of the development of liberty and democracy that it just can't be given a price. The men who signed such a paper likely were not aware of any such price, all they knew is that by signing this, they were dead men; traitors to the crown, declaring themselves enemies to one of the most powerful nations on earth.
There's an email going around that supposedly gives the details of what happened to each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, with grisly details of the difficulties each faced. Most of them died, others suffered torture and loss, their homes destroyed, families fleeing for their lives.
While many of the details aren't true, we do know that each of these men faced hanging for their mere signature. To defy the king in this manner was to die, particularly the mad king George. When the British responded and war developed, most of the signers picked up a rifle and joined the continental army. 32 men signed the declaration, and from that point on their life was troubled.
For example, Thomas McKean wrote to John Adams in 1777 describing how he had been "hunted like a fox by the enemy, compelled to remove my family five times in three months, and at last fixed them in a little log-house on the banks of the Susquehanna, but they were soon obliged to move again on account of the incursions of the Indians."
The signers were known by the local militias and government, some like John Hancock were so ostentatious in their life and their signing that they practically begged attention. During the war, most of them lost property, livelihood, and even family members through the ravages of conflict. Abraham Clark had two sons captured by the British and incarcerated on the prison ship Jersey. John Witherspoon's eldest son James was killed in the Battle of Germantown in October 1777.
George Walton Thomas Heyward, Jr., Arthur Middleton, and Edward Rutledge were all captured by the British and held as prisoners of war. Had the war ended with British victory, they would have been shipped to England and hung as traitors. Richard Stockton was dragged from his bed at night by British loyalists ("Tories").None of the signers died in the Revolutionary War, but men such as Carter Braxton lost his considerable wealth as his trade ships were sunk and captured. He was forced to sell his land holdings to pay for the debts thus incurred.
John Hancock devised a plan to remove the British forces from Boston, where his home and wealth was stored, a plan that would have through siege and bombardment destroyed the city and in particular his own home. Braxton was reluctant to face war because he wisely saw that the Colonists were inadequately prepared - particularly at sea - yet he signed and was an active participant in bringing about the conflict. John Hancock was willing to sacrifice his every last owning to fight the battle for liberty.
BUT... WHY?
Why this drive, this desire, the will to fight against impossible force and odds? It is said that about a third of the population at most really was for revolution, yet the signers stood up and made an unmistakable stand that the British were compelled to answer. These were men who had families, businesses, and personal lives. They knew at best they faced years of war against a superior enemy with only a hope of finding independence and freedom from the tyranny they faced.
Their government under the British governors was tyrannical, oppressive, and ignored the law for personal gain and power. Although allegedly they had a voice in their governance, the king's representatives would move the location and time of meetings so that only his men would be present at the local legislative meetings, and would come to conclusions they preferred. Property was seized, soldiers quartered wherever they wished, taxes were raised and levied without the slightest input from the people.
Yet through it all, they had their own lives, they were reasonably prosperous, they were not being pulled from their homes and killed. This was no brutal, murderous despot. They were not pushed to incredible extremes like the people of Uganda or Cambodia. There were no death squads killing innocent people, no mass imprisonments of groups like in Nazi Germany. What they faced was wrong and unjust, but not murderous and brutal.
Most of the people of the colonies did not want a revolution, they did not want to fight a war of independence. Some were so loyal to the king they fought on the other side, against the rebels. Many of these fled to Canada by the end of the war. The public mood, if polled by Ye Aulde Colonial Gazette would have clearly been in opposition to rebellion (especially if the Gazette was a Royalist paper). In today's America, they would have been viewed as extremists, radicals. Men who were bloodthirsty, men whose ideology was crazy enough to say that it was better to die free than live in chains.
THE DREAM
These were men who believed that liberty was better than comfort, that freedom trumped ease, and that riches were a poor exchange for chains. They saw that a government that was not properly and rightly ruling was a government that not only could be, but must be replaced by the governed. And in that, they saw something better that could possibly be built in this new land. They saw and believed in what most people did not, and would not. Their ideas were chiseled by the reading and studying and education they'd received from such men as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Locke.
The difference here was leadership. The men who became the founding fathers of this nation, supported by and aided by their wives and children, saw a clear, bright dividing line between liberty and tyranny and knew which side they longed to be on. They took the dreams and hopes of the old world and took the steps to forge a reality of those dreams in the new.
They understood the price that had to be paid, they well knew the danger they put themselves in, few better than Patrick Henry:
Today, not just in the United States, but in more and more places around the world as democracy spreads we have a world where liberty rings more true than ever before in human history. Rather than a few, brief isolated pockets of freedom and democracy, we have a long trend of ever expanding liberty for more and more people. We are enjoying the benefits of those who have fought and suffered and sacrificed and died for us in years past.
VETERAN'S DAY
When we look at Veteran's day this year, we look at a moment in time when we should be remembering that price that was paid and is being paid. Liberty is not the natural state of man, but rather tyranny. Where there is no struggle and not blood paid, oppression is the default. One strong force will rule the others who would rather live in tyranny than fight for liberty. Liberty is what we long for as humans, whatever place we find ourselves, but it is not brought about through dreams.
I signed the Declaration of Independence by going to the official website and using their interactive page. You can print off a copy that bears your signature. It was fun, and I certainly would be proud to stand in solidarity with those men. Yet I enjoy the benefits of their real signing and their real struggles and their real blood. Every day I wake up in America, I'm a beneficiary of the men and women who fought and died in the past in the armed forces, the heroes and cowards, the men who fought boldly and reluctantly, the soldiers who were drafted and volunteered. All these soldiers paid the price so that I and hundreds of millions of others worldwide can enjoy freedom where they live.
I write, and I teach and I discuss, trying to promote the ideals these soldiers fought for and the signers of the Declaration of Independence lived and died by. I am no soldier, nor could I be. I cannot be the one who takes the stand, because not only do I live in a time without such a crisis, but I have not the health to attempt such a thing. All I can do is teach and write and give my ideas.
Yet like everyone else, what I can do is learn. I can find out more, study, and research to know why these men were great, what they believed, and why. In a society where all too often hardship is faced with submission, and tough questions are answered "what-ever!" We all have a duty to know what we can so that the dream those men and women died for all those years, what all those soldiers suffered for, so that dream will not and cannot be lost.
Veteran's day is not a day to worship the soldier, it is not a day to venerate the men as if they were greater than men. They were men and women just like you and me, sometimes weeping in terror as they were forced to take another march, to charge another enemy line, to take another hill when they thought they could do no more. Being a soldier isn't John Wayne glory from hour to hour. It's hard work, dirt, grime, dust, and even misery. Yet these men and women fought and died for the cause of liberty and justice and virtue. They fought for the dreams and ideals of the founding fathers even if they weren't aware of it at the time.
There's an episode of Band of Brothers called Why we fight that was late in the series. It portrays the war weary, battered, and increasingly cynical soldiers of the 101st Airborne division (Easy company). They have been told over and over "one more fight" yet have been placed in worse and worse battles, culminating in the ghastly Ardennes forest holding off the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge. Now they are being trucked deeper and deeper into enemy territory, and they've lost their will. They can't understand what the point of this is, they yell at the German POWs for forcing them to spend all this time at war.
And it is in this episode that they find a death camp with skeletal and piles of dead victims, mostly Jews. The men are stricken, they can't find any words, they are for once silent and lose their jokes and banter. This, then, is why they fight, finally face to face with the enemy, with the meaning and significance of the tyranny they are fighting to prevent from sweeping over the world, they understand.
Individual soldiers usually have little to no idea what they're doing or why. They have a general broad sense of "defeat the enemy" but only sometimes what specifically they're up to. Yet they do what they must, and that selfless sacrifice is what our liberty is built on. We honor these men and women not for their superhuman glory, but for the fact that were it not for them, we'd not enjoy what we have now. We owe them a debt of gratitude and honor that we cannot repay, a burden of responsibility based upon their lives, sacrifice, maiming, and death that each of us must undertake.
THE BURDEN
We must live lives worthy of that sacrifice, and more, we must find ways to strive to make that dream live on each day. Who do you vote for? What do you support? How do you react to crisis and policy? Where is your loyalty? Does your team winning in the political game mean more than why they win? What have you learned about the history and meaning of liberty and what the founding fathers believed?
There is a lot of talk of losing civil liberties and dissolving the constitution these days by people who with little education but great emotion seize upon the most radical fears and threats they are told about government. The biggest problem with these cries is not their hollow and fantastical nature, but rather their false nature. It is that these cries of wolf make real cries of concern less compelling. When a nutcase cries that the Trilateral Commission is secretly taking the brains of our leaders and replacing them with lizard minds so our overlords can maintain control, real concerns about government are less of a warning.
There are real dangers of tyranny in our nation, each time government steps out of line from the constitution, we all lose some liberty. Each time we're faced with a choice between comfort and freedom, choosing comfort betrays those vets and the founding fathers. Each time we surrender more of our freedom to government power because it's easier and requires less personal thought and effort, we're abandoning the dream. None of us stand alone, we all are together, and each of us bears the burden of fighting to keep that dream alive, to fight for liberty and justice, for all.
Veteran's day is a perfect time to know better what it is that our nations stand for, what they should stand for, and how that's changed. Today is the day to start learning.
Their government under the British governors was tyrannical, oppressive, and ignored the law for personal gain and power. Although allegedly they had a voice in their governance, the king's representatives would move the location and time of meetings so that only his men would be present at the local legislative meetings, and would come to conclusions they preferred. Property was seized, soldiers quartered wherever they wished, taxes were raised and levied without the slightest input from the people.
Yet through it all, they had their own lives, they were reasonably prosperous, they were not being pulled from their homes and killed. This was no brutal, murderous despot. They were not pushed to incredible extremes like the people of Uganda or Cambodia. There were no death squads killing innocent people, no mass imprisonments of groups like in Nazi Germany. What they faced was wrong and unjust, but not murderous and brutal.
Most of the people of the colonies did not want a revolution, they did not want to fight a war of independence. Some were so loyal to the king they fought on the other side, against the rebels. Many of these fled to Canada by the end of the war. The public mood, if polled by Ye Aulde Colonial Gazette would have clearly been in opposition to rebellion (especially if the Gazette was a Royalist paper). In today's America, they would have been viewed as extremists, radicals. Men who were bloodthirsty, men whose ideology was crazy enough to say that it was better to die free than live in chains.
THE DREAM
These were men who believed that liberty was better than comfort, that freedom trumped ease, and that riches were a poor exchange for chains. They saw that a government that was not properly and rightly ruling was a government that not only could be, but must be replaced by the governed. And in that, they saw something better that could possibly be built in this new land. They saw and believed in what most people did not, and would not. Their ideas were chiseled by the reading and studying and education they'd received from such men as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Locke.The difference here was leadership. The men who became the founding fathers of this nation, supported by and aided by their wives and children, saw a clear, bright dividing line between liberty and tyranny and knew which side they longed to be on. They took the dreams and hopes of the old world and took the steps to forge a reality of those dreams in the new.
They understood the price that had to be paid, they well knew the danger they put themselves in, few better than Patrick Henry:
It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!For these men, these leaders, the prospect of difficulty, poverty, loss, personal suffering, and a time of great tribulation was a small price to pay for a future of liberty. They were fighting so that the future could be better, they were struggling so that their children and grand children could benefit. They understood that what was best for a man in life was not his personal pleasure, but to build something better than what he had for his family.
Today, not just in the United States, but in more and more places around the world as democracy spreads we have a world where liberty rings more true than ever before in human history. Rather than a few, brief isolated pockets of freedom and democracy, we have a long trend of ever expanding liberty for more and more people. We are enjoying the benefits of those who have fought and suffered and sacrificed and died for us in years past.
VETERAN'S DAY
When we look at Veteran's day this year, we look at a moment in time when we should be remembering that price that was paid and is being paid. Liberty is not the natural state of man, but rather tyranny. Where there is no struggle and not blood paid, oppression is the default. One strong force will rule the others who would rather live in tyranny than fight for liberty. Liberty is what we long for as humans, whatever place we find ourselves, but it is not brought about through dreams.I signed the Declaration of Independence by going to the official website and using their interactive page. You can print off a copy that bears your signature. It was fun, and I certainly would be proud to stand in solidarity with those men. Yet I enjoy the benefits of their real signing and their real struggles and their real blood. Every day I wake up in America, I'm a beneficiary of the men and women who fought and died in the past in the armed forces, the heroes and cowards, the men who fought boldly and reluctantly, the soldiers who were drafted and volunteered. All these soldiers paid the price so that I and hundreds of millions of others worldwide can enjoy freedom where they live.
I write, and I teach and I discuss, trying to promote the ideals these soldiers fought for and the signers of the Declaration of Independence lived and died by. I am no soldier, nor could I be. I cannot be the one who takes the stand, because not only do I live in a time without such a crisis, but I have not the health to attempt such a thing. All I can do is teach and write and give my ideas.
Yet like everyone else, what I can do is learn. I can find out more, study, and research to know why these men were great, what they believed, and why. In a society where all too often hardship is faced with submission, and tough questions are answered "what-ever!" We all have a duty to know what we can so that the dream those men and women died for all those years, what all those soldiers suffered for, so that dream will not and cannot be lost.
Veteran's day is not a day to worship the soldier, it is not a day to venerate the men as if they were greater than men. They were men and women just like you and me, sometimes weeping in terror as they were forced to take another march, to charge another enemy line, to take another hill when they thought they could do no more. Being a soldier isn't John Wayne glory from hour to hour. It's hard work, dirt, grime, dust, and even misery. Yet these men and women fought and died for the cause of liberty and justice and virtue. They fought for the dreams and ideals of the founding fathers even if they weren't aware of it at the time.
There's an episode of Band of Brothers called Why we fight that was late in the series. It portrays the war weary, battered, and increasingly cynical soldiers of the 101st Airborne division (Easy company). They have been told over and over "one more fight" yet have been placed in worse and worse battles, culminating in the ghastly Ardennes forest holding off the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge. Now they are being trucked deeper and deeper into enemy territory, and they've lost their will. They can't understand what the point of this is, they yell at the German POWs for forcing them to spend all this time at war.And it is in this episode that they find a death camp with skeletal and piles of dead victims, mostly Jews. The men are stricken, they can't find any words, they are for once silent and lose their jokes and banter. This, then, is why they fight, finally face to face with the enemy, with the meaning and significance of the tyranny they are fighting to prevent from sweeping over the world, they understand.
Individual soldiers usually have little to no idea what they're doing or why. They have a general broad sense of "defeat the enemy" but only sometimes what specifically they're up to. Yet they do what they must, and that selfless sacrifice is what our liberty is built on. We honor these men and women not for their superhuman glory, but for the fact that were it not for them, we'd not enjoy what we have now. We owe them a debt of gratitude and honor that we cannot repay, a burden of responsibility based upon their lives, sacrifice, maiming, and death that each of us must undertake.
THE BURDEN
We must live lives worthy of that sacrifice, and more, we must find ways to strive to make that dream live on each day. Who do you vote for? What do you support? How do you react to crisis and policy? Where is your loyalty? Does your team winning in the political game mean more than why they win? What have you learned about the history and meaning of liberty and what the founding fathers believed?
There is a lot of talk of losing civil liberties and dissolving the constitution these days by people who with little education but great emotion seize upon the most radical fears and threats they are told about government. The biggest problem with these cries is not their hollow and fantastical nature, but rather their false nature. It is that these cries of wolf make real cries of concern less compelling. When a nutcase cries that the Trilateral Commission is secretly taking the brains of our leaders and replacing them with lizard minds so our overlords can maintain control, real concerns about government are less of a warning.There are real dangers of tyranny in our nation, each time government steps out of line from the constitution, we all lose some liberty. Each time we're faced with a choice between comfort and freedom, choosing comfort betrays those vets and the founding fathers. Each time we surrender more of our freedom to government power because it's easier and requires less personal thought and effort, we're abandoning the dream. None of us stand alone, we all are together, and each of us bears the burden of fighting to keep that dream alive, to fight for liberty and justice, for all.
Veteran's day is a perfect time to know better what it is that our nations stand for, what they should stand for, and how that's changed. Today is the day to start learning.
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Essays
posted by Christopher Taylor at 9:17 AM
1 Comments:
My daughter was six weeks old when 9/11 happened. I can't begin to convey the fear I had in my heart that day, holding her as I watched the events unfold on TV.
Today, she was at my office after school when my brother-in-law dropped in to say hello. He was an Army National Guard member who served in the first Gulf War and also served a year in Kabul, Afghanistan. Four years ago, when he was in Kabul, my daughter would often ask where he was, and I would tell her "He's half way across the world fighting some really bad guys." She and I haven't talked about it much since he's been back.
While he was at my office today, I thanked him for his service and told him I hope he got the respect he deserved on Veteran's day. My daughter spoke up and said that she had seen him at school today when they had a honorary service for all the veterans who work there (he is also a teacher and a coach). I asked her if she remembered what a veteran was. She smiled and said, "Yeah, they're the ones who go half way around the world to fight the bad guys. They're why I don't worry."
Me and my bro-in-law both got a bit choked up. I know that meant the world to him. What he doesn't know, and what I could never properly convey to him, is just how much it means to me that these men and women are out there making a post 9/11 world where my little girl doesn't worry. When she was 6 weeks old, I'd have sworn that would be impossible.
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