A tenacious appreciation of liberty
The nation went through turmoil beyond a killer pandemic since July 4, 2020. Credit: AFP via Getty Images/Paul J. Richards
The jarring path to this moment from our last Independence Day felt like no other.
On July 3, 2020, the president, Donald Trump, offered the republic one of his bleaker and more divisive speeches at Mount Rushmore. He seemed to blame anyone who disliked him as conducting "a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children." More of this followed at the White House the next day.
In the months that followed, the nation went through some things beyond a killer pandemic that the administration could not seem to confront. Trump lost the election to Joe Biden, whom he tried but failed to get a foreign country to prosecute. Trump took the blatantly fraudulent step of screaming fraud. His supporters rioted at the Capitol, talking the talk of patriotism while walking the walk of sedition.
Wanton agitation rocked the cities last summer, with the George Floyd case and racial injustice both cause and excuse. In Portland and Seattle especially, video-conscious "rebels" acted as if legitimate authorities were the collective enemy.
Consider too the sometimes clueless targeting of symbols and statues. Some virtue-signalers and exhibitionists try to symbolically shove the enshrined Abraham Lincoln and the progressive Theodore Roosevelt into the same box as the terroristic Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
But the United States this July Fourth remains recognizable. Notice that no matter how tortured the arguments may get, Americans still see fit to frame hot issues in the language of individual rights and liberty, because that's what persuades people.
Predictably, the Trump Organization tried to use that language Thursday when it slammed the company's indictment and that of CFO Allen Weisselberg over alleged business and tax transgressions as nothing more than political persecution.
On another battlefront: Is it extreme to blow off public health measures that were needed to control a vicious virus? Perhaps, but we do have freedom over our bodies, and vaccines are ultimately voluntary. This is America, and nobody goes to jail for refusing.
Shootings out of control? We do have a Second Amendment, so any solutions will have to accommodate that.
Political lies getting out of hand? Probably, but nobody is abolishing the First Amendment.
And when a religious or business institution resists accommodating someone based on sexual orientation, the real question is whose rights are to be protected.
Despite our dilemmas, most rational people still see a need to balance people's rights.
Remember too that this republic has survived much worse violence and transgressions of life and liberty on the homefront.
Consider the days and weeks before July 4, 1863, when the Battle of Gettysburg was fought — while New York City burned in murderous draft riots that targeted Blacks.
During World War I film promoter Robert Goldstein was sentenced to 10 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act by distributing a silent movie called "The Spirit of '76," that portrayed British redcoats committing the most horrid atrocities during the American Revolution.
Federal prosecutors essentially accused Goldstein of aiding Germany against our ally England. The defendant denied it, saying the nation was in a patriotic mood and he thought that could make for a box-office success.
The court case was called United States v. 'The Spirit of '76.' More than a century later, the republic is still alive, and we are free to recall the irony and the folly of how freedom was curbed.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
