Building Something Better Together
– By James McFadden –
I love July, specifically, the 4th of July, and everything it has come to represent in my life.
My father was a patriotic man, he served in the Marines and was part of the fleet that put the first boots in Vietnam.
He wasn’t proud of that. He was conflicted and angered by many of the things that went into that war. In Particular, the political torcher it put our Nation through. Nevertheless, he loved America and everything it stands for; or at the very least, tries to stand for.
America isn’t perfect, no Nation on this planet is. But its principles have made many great things possible. And those principles still do. And God willing, they will continue to do so for many generations to come.
Everything that is happening in our society today is because of the foundation this great Nation has been built on. Riots and protests, whether peaceful or not are possible because of the Constitutional foundation that was put in place. Imagine turning you back to the flag or the supreme leader in North Korea and you’ll see what I mean.
The founders of this great Nation believed that “All men were created equal.” It took some time for that to start being realized, and it is still in the process of becoming self-evident. But for many, this principle has always been held sacred and up to that standard which was first embodied as our Nation was born.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” You see, not ALL states tolerated slavery, it was rebellious states that were not willing to embrace what the world was in the process of embracing, and it took a war, among other things, to start the process of eradicating that practice from our lands and from our hearts.
The war against racism has been fought for hundreds of years and continues to be fought up to this day. It started as early as 1787 in Britain and then at the National Assembly in 1789 when the assembly adopted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man”. That was during the French Revolution!
As I said, this is not a perfect Nation. Some of our forefathers made some serious mistakes, but many of them have also tried to undo those mistakes. And men like them continue to do so today.
I love the principles this Nation was and is built on. They are making progress possible. We can’t throw everything aside just because parts of it are broken. We need to work together and solve our problems as a Nation and build or rebuild those parts that need to be fixed. We can’t do that if we are divided, we must find a way to come to the table together. And I believe it’s possible because the principles written in the Constitution tell me to believe in something bigger and better than what we had yesterday. That’s what I’m a patriot of, that hope that we can build something better, together. God Bless the U.S.A.
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