a haiku for the 4th
By Jon Bishop
Light spiders brightness
across the dark and cool.
Yearly, lovely transcendence.
Independence Day Remains Worth Celebrating
By Robert Arrington
Independence Day, the 4th of July, falls on Sunday this year. The following day is the official holiday for that reason. Most Americans will do their best to celebrate the holiday, with perhaps more verve than last year, because the COVID pandemic is at last subsiding.
That’s as it should be. While the bold Declaration would not be brought to fruition on the battlefields of the Revolution for another five years, and not recognized by Treaty for another two years after that, the Declaration was one of history’s turning points, and set the infant nation on a course of republican representative government, in which the sovereign would be elected and there would be no hereditary aristocracy.
This 4th of July Remember that the American Revolution was More Restoration than Revolution
By David Churchill Barrow
Were the shopkeepers and farmers who took up arms at Lexington and Concord to fire “the shot heard ’round the world” out to turn their society upside down, they way the French peasantry would attempt a decade or so later? No, in fact the opposite. They were endeavoring to keep what they already had. They fired upon troops sent by a king and his minions who had forgotten that despite being “colonials” they were Englishmen first and foremost, with all the rights and privileges thereunto belonging. (As an aside, this is why Paul Revere never rode through towns yelling “The British are coming! The British are coming!” His hearers all considered themselves British.)
