July 2026 is turning out to be the strangest Independence Day celebration I’ve seen in my 71+ years on earth. My country seems turned upside-down and cattywampus. I’m worried but still have hope that the America I thought I knew will pull together to make it through these trying times and continue to strive to make our nation a better place: one that embodies the ideals of those who signed the Declaration of Independence.
This morning, I read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s July 2 newsletter, which reminded me that our founders faced and overcame great challenges. It’s worth comparing our current national situation to that of the colonies in 1776. Below is a snippet from her newsletter:
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In January 1776 a 47-page pamphlet, published in Philadelphia by newly-arrived immigrant Thomas Paine, provided the spark that inspired his new countrymen to make the leap from blaming the king’s ministers for their troubles to blaming the king himself. “In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote.
Paine rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others, and he ridiculed the idea that an island should try to govern a continent. “Where…is the King of America?” Paine asked in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend…so far as we approve of monarchy…in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”
“We have it in our power,” Paine wrote, “to begin the world over again.”
Richardson ended her essay by noting that the delegates to the Continental Congress held the “…ultimate conviction that a nation should rest not on the arbitrary rule of a single man and his hand-picked advisors, but on the rule of law.”
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It occurs to me that our current national disquiet bears a striking resemblance to what Paine described. In 1776, the colonists responded mightily, and the rest is, well, history.
I’m seeing now that the usurper whom Paine predicted could rise has done so indeed, “…laying hold of popular disquietudes…” and “collect[ing] together the desperate and the discontented…” and “…assuming to themselves the powers of government, [so they] may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” I don’t think that’s an overstatement.
The question today is whether Americans will seize the moment and stand against corruption and tyranny, as our forebears did two hundred fifty years ago. I think we still have the gumption to do so. Will we use it?
#commonsense #declarationofindependence #NoKings
Photo attribution: Scanned by uploader, originally by Thomas Paine., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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