Life, Liberty, and a Permenant Obligation to People You Don’t Even Like
So today has been re-affirmed as “Loyalty Day” by our current Commander in Chief. Well… okay, fine, whatever. It’s not as though we don’t already have a number of patriotic-themed holidays that we thoroughly ignore despite these types of reminders. What’s one more?
The whole thing smacks of Orwellian doublespeak, to be sure, but any propganda is bound to display the characteristics of its nature, afterall.
That aside, I think it is a good idea to keep in mind the history on which this country was founded and maintained; that habit, in addition to tracking the most recent ways the nation is being run, should provide us with more ways to keep the BS down to a bare minimum. Granted, “A bare minimum” will undoubtedly still be a very large amount, but that is the issue with democracy in the first place: it requires many people to get together in the attempt to reach an agreement on which policies will work out the best for the most people at once. But I digress.
What I wanted to do was share an interesting bit of history. The Gadsden Flag - more commonly identified by the “Don’t Tread On Me” slogan - and its variations is a symbol of the colonies bonding together and eventually establishing a nation. (More interesting symbols and symbolic history.) This flag serves as a reminder that it took a series of issues to finally end the 100+ year old trend of the colonies being relatively independent from one another. While it does make sense for the colonies to band together to show solidarity against outside influence, I find the fact that they stayed together and sacrificed the possibility of maintaining their own rule puzzling. (i.e.Maintaining their own government systems as-developed prior to British interference was the whole reason they banded together in the first place, so why give that up?)
Take my own current home state of New Hampshire:
A pre-Revolution event occurring in New Hampshire was the removal in 1774, by a small party of patriots at New Castle, of the powder and guns at Fort William and Mary. Other Revolutionary events included New Hampshire’s participation in the Battle of Bunker Hill at which nearly all the troops doing the actual fighting were said to have been from this State; the signing of the Declaration of Independence by New Hampshire’s Josiah Bartlett, Matthew Thornton, and William Whipple; General John Stark’s victory at the Battle of Bennington; and the success of Captain John Paul Jones at sea.
Just as it was the first to declare its independence and adopt its own constitution, New Hampshire was the ninth and deciding state in accepting the National Constitution as that of a republic, never to be known under any other form of government. New Hampshire’s John Langdon was the first acting vice-president of the United States, and was President of the Senate when Washington was elected first president.
Note the italics added there. If New Hampshire had declared idenpendence and had it’s own government, why then did those people choose to throw in their lot with the rest of these states permenantly? Probably due to influences comprised of equal parts charisma and implied threat. I could picture a thought process of: “If we don’t stick with this group, they could just as easily maintain this union and march on us for not complying! Of course, this has worked out pretty well so far… Okay, I guess we can do this.” Pure speculation on my part, but it would be easier to continue to follow the precedent than it would have been to fight 12 other (extremely excitable) colonies’ worth of men. Just think. If things had turned out differently, I might be reporting to you from the country of New Hampshire.
Of course, that isn’t how it turned out. So I hope you’re enjoying this country as much as I often do, because even though I was never asked if I wanted to be an American or not, it’s turned out to be a pretty okay thing. Loyal? Only to myself and my own, and thankfully I happen to have been born into a country that will allow me to say that. So I doff my proverbial hat to you today, dear America. Not because some temp up on Capital Hill said I should, but because even though it may be unbalanced, and founded on even stranger stuff, it’s done alright for itself.
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Christine said,
May 2, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
Of course, there is also the question of the British. If the colonies had all dispersed, they would’ve been easy pickings for the British to re-absorb them.
Once they were all doing their own thing, Britain swoops in and invades New Hampshire.
Georgia says, “Not my problem.” And then the states fall one by one, and they start to band together, but it’s too late, and all of a sudden, it is Georgia’s problem! And America is British again.
admin said,
May 2, 2007 @ 5:24 pm
That’s true. I failed to cover that point. There was a necessity for unity after The Revolution, to be sure. Still, they could just as easily have agreed to keep to their own corners, but maintain an ongoing truce. Was it really necessary to bond the colonies together as a single country for the common goal of foreign defense?