The 4th of July feels like a sad holiday to me. We celebrate an independence won over two centuries ago, like an out of shape former athlete reminiscing about his glory days on the high school football team.
What we need independence from today isn’t the British — who seem about as threatening as a glass of warm Ovaltine — but from modern tyrannies like big business and, of course, the national security state.
It was always thus
This was the point of Thomas Jefferson saying that a little revolution every now and again is a healthy thing. If there’s ever a population that’s just sitting around assuming everything is gonna be okay because of “the leaders,” or just passively observing that the leaders aren’t good, and therefore, oh no!, or anything like that, that’s a recipe for bad bad trouble.
It’s you and me man
"What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation/
We made it over a century and a half, but only barely. I don’t think these words were meant to hold up in today’s society. How is it possible that you can quote somebody from TJ’s time and say that it is at all like our time? Let’s face it, he was just a prognosticating bullshitter. To look back at a quote like this to justify the actions of the present is a horrific and insensitive thing to do.
Or, as someone from a revolutionary time, it could be his perspective on why revolution is necessary.