image credit: floridatoday.com
We celebrate our Independence Day this coming Wednesday. Steve
Hilton published a thoughtful piece on what we love about America entitled “I didn’t
get the true genius of America’s founders till I moved here. Here’s what
worries me now.” The full article is here, but below are a few excerpts:
It wasn’t until I actually lived in
the U.S. that I started to understand the true genius of America’s founders and
what they put in place two-and-a-half centuries ago. I saw it in the way that
contemporary political debates are conducted with reference to the framers’
intent. I saw it in the huge importance of Supreme Court rulings – reported and
debated with a prominence commensurate with the judiciary’s status as a
co-equal branch of government – but totally alien to someone familiar with the
British system.
And I saw the genius of the
Founding Fathers most vividly of all in a family visit to Philadelphia a couple
of years ago. While there, I took my two sons to the National Constitution
Center, a truly wonderful place that all Americans should visit if they
can.
The highlight of the Constitution
Center is a regular live performance telling the story of the Declaration of
Independence, the Revolutionary War, the years leading up to the Constitutional
Convention – and then of the momentous deliberations that produced the U.S.
Constitution itself.
That performance literally moved me
to tears as it brought to life in the most immediate and powerful way the
beautiful idea at the heart of America: liberty under the law, an idea that had
never before been expressed and guaranteed by any nation.
From that idea, and from those
incomparable founding documents, come all the things that are special about
America – things that are so different to (and, frankly, so much better than)
what you find where I grew up, in England. And of course vastly better than
what my parents experienced where they grew up in Communist Hungary.
. . .
The melting pot; decentralized
government; a republic of equals; a Constitution enshrining the precious ideal
of people power. It is all under threat this Fourth of July – and we need to
fight for it.
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