The Fourth of July passed Friday. The cookouts and fireworks are over. Perhaps now is a good time to reflect on whether this country is what we want it to be.
We tend to idolize the Founding Fathers this time of year. Maybe we should try to measure up to them instead. I don't think most of those founders would be proud that we spy so much and kill so many people with drones. True, they didn't have international terrorism to deal with. Oh no -- they had Redcoats, Hessian troops and the Royal Navy. Great Britain was the superpower of their time, after all.
Debt and taxes? Two things. This country was born in the financial hole. The big difference now is we're in a Chinese hole and not a French one. As for taxes, the Sons of Liberty cried for "No Taxation without Representation," not "No More Taxation." Now we have plenty of representation. Incompatible points of view are so well represented we can't get anything done.
Abraham Lincoln measured up. I probably quote Lincoln in my columns more often than any other U.S. president. I particularly like things he said about the document those founders signed July 4, 1776. He believed "all men are created equal," just like the Declaration of Independence says. I'd argue his line of logic leads to equality for all of us, whatever gender. So the quotes from Lincoln below apply equally to women, in my view:
"I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity.
"They defined, with tolerable distinctness, in what they did consider all men created equal -- equal in 'certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' This they said, and this they meant.
"They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere."
Lincoln said all that in one of his famous debates with Stephen Douglas.
You cannot argue people beyond our borders are fair game for drone strikes and assassination if you believe in such equality.
I was watching an interview with a family in Afghanistan. They had people killed in what we acknowledge to have been a very bad case of mistaken identity. I'm a pretty cold fish and was watching the video of the bodies left behind pretty dispassionately. Then one of the survivors called our special forces troops "American Taliban." That made me angry. Unlike terrorists, the squad didn't set out to kill innocents. They were wrong, but they didn't pick people at random.
Then I imagined how I'd feel if two of my sons and their pregnant wives had been killed in front of me and their children, only to be told much later that it was a mistake after refusing to let it go and getting a reporter on my side.
If you can't put yourself in that Afghan father's shoes just a little bit, you don't believe all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
I harbor no doubts George III would have sent some drones to Boston on Declaration signing day, by the way. The kind of executive power we're permitting isn't consistent with liberty.
That reminds me of something else Lincoln said: "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Freedom dies with us in such a suicide. I believe that.
DOUG THOMPSON IS A POLITICAL REPORTER AND COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.
Commentary on 07/06/2014