Is There Still Worth in Celebrating Independence Day?

To those of you residing in the United States - Happy Independence Day! Hopefully you’re partaking in some sort of parade, banquet or event to commemorate the two-hundred and forty-ninth birthday of your great country. It’s pretty remarkable to think that the American ideal of liberty still reigns supreme in the land of the free. 

Oh wait…

Zohran Mamdani, the soon-to-be Mayor of New York, seeing as the Democratic nominee almost always wins in that district, wants race-specific taxes “in richer and whiter neighbourhoods”. Other flagship policies include government-instituted grocery stores to prevent exorbitant “price gouging”, along with raising the hourly minimum wage to $30 an hour, free childcare and free buses city-wide. So it's the fast-track to socialism in New York. So to New York residents celebrating their freedom today, remember to cherish it, because soon it's gonna be gone.

Here's a funny AI cartoon I saw online, representing the sort of dichotomy:

The American revolutionary war was prompted by tyrannical-overreach by the UK government, caused by taxes levied on a colony that had no say regarding such policies. Increasingly vociferous sentiment on the insidious laws that were placed on His Majesty's colonial subjects sparked outrage, which gave way to the heroes - like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison etc. - American citizens contemporarily venerated, but in only a fleeting manner. Now, the descendants of such remarkable forebears praise their efforts to limit government overreach while voting for more and more government overreach.

Take Thomas Massie, a US congressman for Kentucky, who lives almost completely off-the-grid, who has to come to terms with cattle laws that mean he can't even sell his cow's meat to a neighbour down the road.

Can you imagine any of the founding fathers seeing the state of contemporary United States? "Laws on cattle meat and government-owned bodegas in the most populous city in the country? It's a strange country, isn't it?" You can imagine them saying. And they'd be right to come to such conclusions, because in fundamental ways, the country they created is now no-longer the one they envisaged. One of their sole aims to become independent was that it meant they could become a free, prosperous nation. Which, could probably still be considered to be true. But the more that the Zohran Mamdani types get elected, the more that those principles become eroded from American society.

A key quote that comes from Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a pamphlet produced in 1776 that became popular due to its evocative writing on America's strive for independence, reads:

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

If Americans only "undergo the fatigue of supporting it" by lighting a few fireworks, throwing on some patriotic gear and eating a few hot dogs one day a year, you may aswell can the whole holiday itself.