LET FREEDOM RING
Like most every one, I have great memories of the Fourth of July as a child. We lived in very small towns but all of then managed to put on a parade which consisted of some dreadful floats, the local high school band, usually also dreadful, and a fire truck or two. We lived too far from relatives to travel on one day and come back, so Fourth of July fun was spent in Montgomery, W.Va., Peru, Indiana, and Clifton Forge, VA. The day always ended with fireworks, also usually dreadful but we never realized that till we moved to Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio. . But there was always something about the Fourth that made it special. In my day as a school child, we finished school in May well before Memorial Day and we started school several days after Labor Day. My strong memory of my childhood summers was that the time between school getting out for the summer and the Fourth of July went very slowly but once the Fourth came and went, it was all too quickly time to go back to school. As a child, these were the emotions and thoughts that mattered.
As an adult the Fourth of July brings other thoughts to the fore. The older I become the wiser the founding fathers and mothers of this nation appear to be. What they dreamed and drafted in the 1700′s still works today. The freedoms which they wrote into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the very things we live by and today celebrate. Largely unchanged since the time of their drafting, they serve us well, some 224 years later. The Independence for which they had to fight a war won us a cherished position in the eyes of most of the world and the rights we have come to expect and enjoy still serve us well. I like the fact that there is no established religion in this country and I would not want my Catholic faith to which I have given my life to ever become the “established” religion. Religious pluralism is in the air we breathe and we are free to practice our beliefs free of government coercion. As a nation, we have not solved every problem that we confront from the early days of this union we call the United States of America. I can affirm, for example, the constitutional right to bear arms, but I think there need to be limitations place on that right that limits the arms we can bear. I do not believe that the constitutional framers ever envisioned a total right to privacy, in fact I think I could mount a good argument to the contrary. So when a Court beyond which one can only appeal to the Almighty decides the privacy provisions trump the right to life, it is something we have to reject and struggle with to convince the majority of the truth. But we can do all these things because we live in a nation which is free, one, under God and devoted to liberty and justice for all. So if the Fourth of July affords we adult Americans an opportunity to bask in the wisdom of our elders, the experience of more than two hundred years, and have hope for the future, then let freedom ring.
+RNL