River News: Our View

A famous film director, Justine Bateman, has an expression of deep feeling pinned to the top of her X account: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.”

Bateman posted that after last November’s election, and it captures the emotions of many Americans who feel that they can once again speak their minds without being censored, or canceled, or bullied.

Our dictionary defines freedom as the right to say, act, or write what you want, without oppression from the government or others, so long as you don’t violate the rights of other Americans. Given the definition, on this Fourth of July, we can safely say that America is becoming free again.

And quickly.

That freedom extends to all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or ideology. In the United States, America was, until the last decade, a place where everybody could air their grievances, organize and proselytize for electoral and policy victory, and hold the banners of their unique thoughts high and proudly as symbols of liberty.

This year, there is ample evidence that America is returning to those free speech roots, that we are no longer walking on eggshells. Antisemitism is being rooted out of college campuses across the nation; the previous administration’s censorship regime and its corrupt alliance with big business globalism is being dismantled brick-by-brick; the U.S. has fought back against growing European authoritarianism by issuing visa restrictions barring European officials guilty of censorship from entering the U.S.

All in all, America is Becoming Free Again.

Oh sure, there are those who, having lost the ideological war, now try to tear down, create chaos, and disrupt what they see as a “corrupt system.” They assert their “rights” by suppressing the rights of others in the name of equity. They define corrupt as things they disagree with, and bullying, harassment, and intimidation are the only weapons they have, having lost the American people.

The good news is, when you have lost the people, you have lost completely. The more they scream and destroy, the less support they have. Today’s disrupters — whether of the left or right — will soon go the way of Black Lives Matter or the Know Nothing Movement or Occupy Wall Street.

That is to say, their lack of moral compass will leave them lost in the political wilderness; their emptiness of ideas will cause them to burn away like a fog in an early morning sun. The annoying noise they emit today will soon be but irrelevant static adrift in the galaxy: Nobodies going nowhere with no one to care, and knowing they are worthless and inert.

Meanwhile, the rest of America rises to meet this new day with a restoration of our vitality, of reemergence of our hope, and a feeling that we can all strive to be what we want to be, and to say what we want to say.

All that calls for massive celebration, and so we look forward to America as it parades its best this Independence Day. To all a great — and responsible and safe — holiday, and remember to give thanks to the country that makes it all possible. What a difference a year makes, and the last year has made all the difference for future generations.

We should take a moment this weekend, too, to remember and honor the sacrifices made by so many to guarantee our liberty. Were America not the home of the brave, it most certainly would not be the home of the free.

To all our service men and women, past and present and future, and especially to those who paid for out liberty with their lives, we thank you so much and are forever in your debt.

Finally, it’s important to remember what the American Revolution was all about, and why it remains so relevant today. 

Our founding documents make the mission clear in no uncertain terms. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are indeed living documents, as progressives like to say, only they are not living in the way progressives think.

Our founding documents live not because they are outdated screeds that authoritarians can manipulate and reshape for their own contemporary ends; they live because the principles of liberty and justice for all that they embrace and embody still inspire people around the world. They always will, because, deep down, the one common denominator of all people is that they want to be free.

That is the hope and promise of America.

So yes, the American revolution was about throwing off the shackles of an oppressive monarchy in England. It was a monarchy that inflicted pain and injury upon the colonists in much the same way some groups seek to do to our population today — to deprive them of religious liberty, to restrict their ability to govern themselves, or to curb the use of free will to determine our own destiny.

The colonists wanted to overthrow all that and more — unfair taxation without representation, unreasonable and warrantless searches of their private homes — but they also wanted to lay down eternally in stone the fundamentals of a happy, prosperous, and meaningful life.

The mission of the American Revolution was nothing less than the battle cry of pure freedom itself — individual liberty, equality of opportunity, the right to own property, and, maybe most important, the right to pursue truth, and to speak truth to power, without losing one’s precious liberty.

The loss of such fundamental freedoms is the loss of all freedoms, and renders life meaningless.

This Fourth of July, the evidence is that the mission is safe, though it is not secure. Every generation must win freedom again, and this year is no different. Daily government regulations restrict freedoms in ways we barely recognize until it’s too late. Bureaucracy injects its totalitarian poisons through a multitude of tentacles, the number of which the Founders could never have imagined.

Still, this year our leaders have pointed us in a new direction, toward a beacon of light at the end of the tunnel. They have exposed the fraud of all those oppose freedom using the name of freedom. We’re onto them, and that’s half the battle.

If on this Independence Day we all remember what the American journey is about — an exceptional nation seeking and sustaining liberty for all as an end unto itself — America will succeed.

And America is succeeding, indeed decompressing. There’s no more walking on eggshells for patriots of all belief systems. This Fourth of July, our parades will take bold strides for freedom, and our hearts will march with valor and bravery with them.

Have a great Independence Day, and march on.