When we celebrate Independence Day, we rejoice over the freedom won from the English crown. But there’s a new master gaining power in America. We need to shrug it off before it takes over.
Because we’re marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, it would be instructive to see where we are today by comparing a few passages from our founding document with current events.
1776: King George III has “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
2020: The cancel culture has cost people jobs, income, and social status.
1776: The king “has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
2020: Rioters, looters, statue-topplers, and the criminals holed up in “autonomous zones” have killed and injured, stolen, burned, and destroyed.
1776: The crown imposed “taxes on us without our consent.”
2020: Black Lives Matter is at its core a marxist organization, while its “partner organization,” the Movement for Black Lives, “calls for a ‘progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.’”
1776: The king abolished “our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.”
2020: Defund the police.
1776: Our Creator endowed us “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
2020: Conform or else.
1776: The colonists complained the king quartered “large bodies of armed troops among us.”
2020: Squatters unlawfully take over private and public property in Seattle.
1776: George transported “large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny.”
2020: “I think about a third of the people are from out of town here to make the city burn.” – Justin Terrell, executive director of the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage.
1776: The king “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.”
2020: Suspects in several states have been arrested for inciting riots after the death of George Floyd.
The compare-and-contrast go on for a while, but today is the beginning of a holiday weekend and readers likely have other things to do. Our hope is that we at least provoked some further thought.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board