A quote variously attributed to many asserts that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Its point is sound and worth pondering as another Independence Day holiday looms.
Amidst the usual relaxation, travel and other pleasant festivities, it’s nearly impossible to fully escape an underlying, darker concern that the American experiment is now being strenuously pressure-tested.
That’s a natural sentiment, given the human tendency to live in the moment, with history’s lessons barely seen through a dim glass darkly. Such brings to mind Ben Franklin’s long-ago quip to a questioner who wondered just what kind of new government the Constitutional Convention called into existence: “A republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin responded.
The angry tenor of today’s everyday existence, daily events and ever-deeper partisan divides can make Franklin seem nearly a prophet.
A quick reading of the first rough draft of history known as newspapers can help put things into a more-hopeful perspective. We’ve been here before as a nation, and the republic survived just fine, thank you. Not without sacrifice, tumult or even bloodshed, but the American way has stubbornly endured. It’s likely to do so for a long time yet, if we remember all that, and think and behave in accordance with this nation’s highest ideals.
On the pages of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution from the July 4 holiday weekend of 1967 came news and commentary of war, troubles in the Mideast, a violent civil disturbance in downtown Atlanta and worries about upcoming talks with a Soviet Union that was a powerful foil against American interests. Columnist Celestine Sibley wrote about a Cuban family that lost two sons to drowning in Lake Lanier less than five days after arriving in the U.S. Sibley detailed support offered by a Decatur church that had reached out to the family, which had fled the repressive Castro regime.
The specifics of events were different 50 years ago, but the themes remain unchanged across the decades. We persevered somehow, as Americans have always done.
In expounding on his belief that the Constitution’s tenets were divinely ordained, Benjamin Franklin asserted that “I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel; we shall be divided by our little partial, local interests, our projects will be confounded and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, or conquest.”
That prospect should worry us, as it did Franklin. We must be better than that.
The ideals honed 200-plus years ago should – and must – serve us well today.
Independence Day should remind us that we’re still dependent on each other, whether we want to be or not.
Andre Jackson, for the Editorial Board.
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