Happy birthday, America! Gird your loins!

On this 4th of July, as an adopted son of this country, I'd like to thank my foster-countrymen for welcoming me into their family.  May all of us celebrate this anniversary with the solemnity it deserves and the joy it merits.

Let us also use it to gird up our loins, mentally, physically, intellectually, morally and spiritually.  We face a threat to the existence of the very essence of this country, what America was intended to be by its Founding Fathers.  That threat has been too long ignored or played down - and that mistake has proved almost fatal.  Today the threat has grown until it seems overwhelming, about to roll over the last vestiges of the ideals upon which this country was established in a giant tsunami of statism, socialism, group-centrism and anti-individualism.  The recent Supreme Court decision about Obamacare was merely its latest manifestation.

However, although many battles - too many - have been lost, I don't believe that the ideals of the Founders have been defeated.  Too many who believed in them have lived and died for them, and the tree of liberty has been watered far too many times.  I don't - I cannot - believe the war is lost.  I shall live the rest of my life doing my best to give active expression to that belief, and keep up the fight.

In 1940, Britain faced military catastrophe.  Winston Churchill said at the time:

His words apply very profoundly to us today.  The danger we face in these United States at this time isn't an invading army, but our enemy is no less relentless and determined, and no less opposed to everything for which we stand.  We fight now for the survival of individual freedom and liberty, individual rights and responsibilities.  Our enemy fights for the extinction of the individual as a political force, and his replacement by the amorphous, deviant, moral morass that is group rights and entitlements.  Wherever the latter has been implemented, it has led to the ruin of the societies that tried it.  This is imminent in Europe, and is very visible in parts of this country as we speak.

The battle between these world views will not cease unless and until one side or the other is victorious - and even then, it may blaze up once more in future generations.  In the American Revolution, it has been said, only a relatively small minority (perhaps 20%) of this country's people supported the struggle (and not all of them actively).  They were opposed by those who remained loyal to Britain, and a vastly greater number who were politically neutral, not supporting one side or the other.  That sounds rather similar in terms of proportions to the political forces opposed to each other at present, doesn't it?

The difference between Revolutionary times and our own is that our battle is not fought with guns, nor can victory be obtained using them, because guns can never implant liberty or inspire it in the hearts of human beings.  They can only defend liberty if it is already there.  In the long run, liberty cannot be forced upon people who choose in their hearts to be slaves.  They will simply surrender it again at the earliest opportunity.  As evidence of this, witness those who whimper daily for more government handouts, and willingly surrender their individual liberties - even their capacity for rational thought - to those who offer to provide and/or increase 'entitlements'.  Such people will always choose the easy way.  Our enemies know that they can always rely on their support at the polls, provided they promise to force others - us - to pay for what the entitlement-seekers want, rather than make them work to earn it themselves.

I suggest we adopt a paraphrase of Winston Churchill's words as our thought for this day.

"Upon this battle depends the survival of [American] civilization ... and the long continuity of our institutions and our [nation].  The whole fury and might of the enemy [is now] turned on us. [They know] that [they] will have to break us ... or lose the war. If we can stand up to [them], all [America] may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted [social theory and politics]. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if [this nation lasts] for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Peter