What would our Founding Fathers think if they could see us now?
Our Founders deserve a lot of credit and rightly so for creating a form of government that, for the first time in history, recognized the rights of all (free, white) men, and gave all (free, white) men a say in their form of government.
The true genius of the Founding Fathers is that their guidelines for a fledgling nation, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, if anything, fit us better today than they fit the nation that existed when written.
The United States today is a multicultural, multicolored nation, one that has likely changed beyond the wildest imagination of even the most talented dreamer among the founders and they were a group of guys who dared to dream that a bunch of small independent colonies with no navy and barely a military between them could stave off the greatest power on earth at the time.
When George Washington handed off the reins in 1797 and headed back to Mount Vernon for his last years, it was an orderly transfer of power the likes of which had never been seen before.
Up until the day George turned in his tri-corner hat, there were a few who wondered whether or not he would keep his word and step down willingly.
Everybody knew that a King ruled for life.
Nobody had ever been a president before.
Today we Americans take an orderly transfer of power as a matter of course.
When one peacefully elected president handed over the reins to another last November, it was an occasion to marvel at how far race relations have come in this country. Nobody paid much attention to the fact that the most powerful man in the world willingly turned the job over to his philosophical opposite just because the majority of citizens who voted said he should.
The ability to change governments with the stroke of a pen was a bold idea at the time and it works today as well as it ever did.
This July 4th we should savor that.
This is a powerful, wonderful country in which we live. We are not perfect and we have our problems but we have lasted more or less intact for 233 years now.
This Fourth of July, we should savor that, too.
