Despite enduring some truly painful nonsense yesterday at work, I did want to take a few moments to celebrate- and mourn- the founding of this great nation.

Exactly 237 years ago on this day, a group of aristocratic free-born Englishmen met in a courthouse in Philadelphia to issue a protest against their treatment at the hands of their Colonial rulers that set the stage for a war that would rewrite history, a protest whose words would become immortalised for their conviction, their power, and their respectful yet unbending resolve. Their Declaration was based on the highest and truest principles of English liberty, written by men who were driven beyond the breaking point by an empire that simply wouldn’t listen to them, and given weight and substance by the finest minds ever to hold high office in any nation. Their rebellion against the world’s greatest empire could easily have failed- and indeed, at many moments, it came awfully close to doing just that. Yet when these United States of America were forged upon the anvil of history, as no other sovereign nation before or since has ever been, the world bore witness to something remarkable, something magnificent, something that the Founders themselves often believed could only have happened thanks to the power of the Divine: in possibly the only true break with the long-term patterns of history, a nation had been created with the express intention of preserving human liberty, not taking it.

This has happened at best just two or three times in the entire span of human civilisation. It will very likely never happen again. And now, as I watch the rapid decline of what was once- centuries ago- a bastion of human freedom, devolving into the insanity of absolute tyranny, I can only ask whether you Americans truly appreciate or even understand what it is that you have lost.

This country, for all of its faults at its founding, was a beacon of human ingenuity- the “shining City upon a Hill”, in the words of John Winthrop, “built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, that were open to anyone who had the will and the heart to get here”. Make no mistake- this was the greatest nation on Earth.

All of that is gone, probably for good. This nation’s commitments to freedom and liberty are usurped, shattered, and destroyed, almost surely irretrievably. Your eminently sensible foreign policy of peaceful coexistence and non-intervention was shattered by the beginning of the 20th Century; instead of respecting the boundaries of other nations, this one has routinely gone in search of monsters to slay, for no good reason. Instead of guarding your own borders, you let in immigrants and criminals from your Southern neighbours in the utterly misguided and ahistorical belief that they will somehow become civilised, even though they have demonstrated no such tendency in the past 500 years. Instead of continuing with the great American traditions of free markets and free enterprise, you look to your government for answers and deny your own God-given destinies as a great and free people. You abandon God and His moral creed by worshipping idleness and dissipation, by endorsing sin and greed, and yet you still expect Him to bless you and your countrymen. You spy on each other and bear false witness against each other; you give power to the corrupt and the stupid; you turn your eyes away from the decay that surrounds you; and you hope, without reason, that the relentless patterns of history will somehow spare you by virtue of America’s exceptional nature.

Yes, celebrate America’s founding, for it was a moment without equal in all of history. But mourn it as well, for the greatness that was America is gone, and with it the light and liberty that it once embodied.

Happy 4th!

Quick change from pie to donut eh?