Did you know that the word “holiday” comes from the term “holy day”? A day that is honored and sanctified above others? July 4th is Independence Day, a “holy day” to us, granted from our holy rollers, the Founding Fathers. They didn’t see it as a time for us lazy, beer-burping baseball spectators to rah-rah the home team or run to grab all the sales at the stores (as wonderful as that is).
Independence Day is about our independence from Great Britain! It’s NOT about immigration! Hello?!
I grew up in the 70s and 80s… and all those stupid TV shows and newscasts were about how wonderful our country is because of all the immigrants we got, and we celebrate it on July 4th, feverishly reciting The New Colossus over and over again. Holy cow, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. July 4th has NOTHING to do with immigration, especially the profligate and unbridled immigration our country saw during the 1800s and late 1990s.
“[Is] rapid population [growth] by as great importations of foreigners as possible… founded in good policy?… They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass… If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements.” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.VIII, 1782. ME 2:118
So while that “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” stuff makes for good poetry, a nation that has not a stable immigration policy with ENFORCED borders isn’t really defined as a nation! And the United States of America does not owe its greatness to the gazilions of immigrants that flooded here from other countries!
P.S. Before you start up on your brainwashed blabber about how xenophobic I sound, please be aware that THIS IS REALITY. So get a life. I’m not xenophobic.
Independence Day is about our independence from Great Britain! It’s NOT about veterans! Nowadays I keep hearing how “We wouldn’t be free without G.I. Joe.” Ummm… sorry, that’s not true. G.I. Joe didn’t go to Normandy or Korea or Vietnam or Kuwait or Iraq to set us free. G.I. Joe went to set Europe, South Korea, South Vietnam, Kuwait, and Iraq free. Oh by the way, the government did a pretty crappy job managing the wars as well as managing the G.I. Joes’ pensions and medical care. :-p Enough said.
Independence Day is about “No King but Jesus.” Yes, a shocker that may come to the brainwashed public school masses, where you learned that the Americans rebelled because our tea was being taxed, and because the patriots were free-thinkers who wanted to be secular humanists and live in a socialist utopia! Ha ha! Have I got an education for you– WRONG.
P.S. Before you start up on your brainwashed blabber about how George Washington was a Deist and etc, please be aware that I am a HISTORY SCHOLAR. Please don’t give me quotes from Thomas Fleming, George Wood, and the other revisionists. Go read the writings of Washington (you can start here), Hamilton, Franklin, Witherspoon, Rush, Webster, and Jay, like I have. You JUST may get an education!
Yeah, I’m feisty today. But there’s something about Independence Day that gets my goat. I have that Patriot blood surging through my veins, and by golly, I hate commie coup d’ etats.
So go out there and eat your hot dog and drink your beer. But remember that it was those God-fearing, Bible-thumpin’, iron-backboned, liberty-loving folks who made it so you could eat and drink in peace and liberty.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
You are absolutely right, Oh Crabby One
July 4th is not about immigration.
But I’d like to point out that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t exactly the “God-fearing, Bible-thumpin’” individual you so eloquently speak of. In truth, it could be said quite the opposite. Thomas Jefferson is well known for developing his own version of the Bible. Jefferson is on record for telling John Adams that he was rescuing the Philosophy of Jesus and the “pure principles which he taught,” from the “artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms as instruments of riches and power for themselves.” And after having selected from the evangelists “the very words only of Jesus,” he believed “there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the founding fathers were actually elitist revolutionaries who did not subscribe to the dogma of allowing their political and religious beliefs to mix. Ben Franklin and his entire family are well known for publicly trashing the Puritans of the time.
Just saying.
Hope this finds you well and have a great 4th of July.
Peace.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Thanks for your comment, Mike. Yes, I am aware of Jefferson’s deist and humanist character. I actually don’t care for the man, what I have read from him (plus, I’m an ardent Hamilton fan). Yet, I find some of his statements quite enlightening. And, like Franklin, while he wasn’t a “believer,” he did believe in the expediency of Christianity.
July 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Anytime. It was my pleasure.
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:29 am
Well I am a Viet Nam vet. I never however felt it was about Veterans. Like you said it is about Independence. And seeing how we are free I am going to eat a lot of hot dogs tomorrow.
Happy Independence Day.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Great post Crabby!
Join a Tea Party on July 4th! You know those “left-wing extremists, gun toting rednecks, Christians, conservatives” that would like to get our President and Congress to get back to actually enforcing the Constitution.
July 4th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Sounds like you have a conservative streak in you. Good point about 7-4!
July 4th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Hey Grampy– thanks for serving! Have a great day.
Grandma Betty and Harrison– I’m a right wing wacko, apparently… truly, I consider myself a Reaganesque Federalist, a die-hard Constitutionalist. The Conservative Party is too liberal for me, heh heh.
July 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Not being an American, I’m not buying in to the discussion of Independence Day. However, thanks for the reminder that a holy-day is a day of remembrance not just an excuse for a booze-up. Enjoy.