4th of July

For the next month I'll be blogging mostly about the 4th of July, or as a dwindling minority of Americans call it, "Independence Day." I recently obtained a domain where I have placed some web pages written years ago, which I hope to update:

http://July4th1776.org

For the most part, Americans have no idea what was achieved on July 4th, 1776, and if they did, most would probably oppose it. Only a small minority would sign the Declaration of Independence and publicly profess its philosophy if asked to do so today.

I'd like to begin with a quotation from Edmund Burke, the British statesman who was sympathetic to the colonists' grievances, and urged the rest of the British House of Commons to give serious attention to them.

It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts out of the ordinary course they can alone be re-established.
(Letter to William Elliot, 1795, quoted by Leonard Read, The Elements of Libertarian Leadership, 1962.)

I'm convinced that if America's Founding Fathers were to travel through time into our day, they would very quickly conclude that "things are gone out of their ordinary course," and they would invoke the right described in the Declaration of Independence as a "duty," and take steps to abolish the government they themselves created. Christopher S. Bentley has drawn the parallels here, and I added a few here.

As I make clear on my July4th1776.org website, I do not believe in the use of violence to overthrow a government. But I do believe that "absolute Despotism" must be denounced, and if the mild British government of 1776 was guilty of "the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States," then the Bush administration, and all previous administrations going back at least to Lincoln, are guilty of much worse.

The Second Amendment, which was not written for hunters and gun-collectors, but which guarantees our right to take up arms and "to throw off such Government" as "becomes destructive of these ends," is today a myth. We could not fight a guerilla war with Washington D.C. and win. Washington D.C. has nukes, and we have safety-locked handguns.

So what are "the acts out of the ordinary course" that "can alone re-establish" things as they ought to be?

I've been thinking--and wrestling--with several ideas, and I'll toss them out in the pages of this blog for your consideration.

During my days in the Catholic Worker Movement, I had the privilege of meeting Daniel Berrigan, the Vietnam War protester who burned draft board files in Catonsville, MD, in 1969, and was for a time on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. Berrigan, along with The Catonsville Nine, had concluded that "things are gone out of their ordinary course" (to use Burke's phrase). (An interview with Daniel Berrigan, celebrating his 85th birthday this weekend, is on Democracy Now, starting 35:00 into the program. I love the archival video footage of the Catonsville Nine in the Selective Service parking lot, burning the files with homemade napalm, all of them conservatively dressed in suits and ties. Those were the days when everyone always dressed up to fly on airplanes or go to a sit-down restaurant.)

Fire, bombs, and destruction of property, even government property, even government property used to commit acts of violence, is still beyond my fortitude. I'm more inclined to wash the flag rather than burn it. But I am moved by and I wrestle with the prophetic call to "beat Swords Into Plowshares."

I think America's Founding Fathers would agree that this is not a time to be concerned with our own reputation and social status. They were willing to risk "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor" in defense of liberty. I'm not called at this time to give up my life. I'm not investing a lot of money in my campaign. The first hurdle I need to overcome is my "honor," the fear of being considered an "extremist" or losing some social standing in the public eye. I must be willing to incorporate "acts out of the ordinary course" in my campaign. I don't think this is a time to worry about being a "respectable" "mainstream" candidate.

Someone has said that "Bad publicity is better than no publicity at all." Consider an extra-ordinary campaign event which the press ridicules or which results in my arrest, but which wakes a few people up, gets them thinking, and causes them to apostatize from the religion of the Messianic State: is it worth it? Suppose 4 out of 5 people call me a fool, or "unpatriotic," but the fifth person becomes a libertarian. I would say that's progress, even if not all that great compared with batting averages. But if, at the end of the election campaign, all 5 people have not lost their "respect" for me, but have taken no steps closer to America's Libertarian Founding Fathers, what have I really accomplished?