The 'anniversary festival' of freedom

Today, we celebrate the nation's independence with picnics and barbecues, parades and festivals, fireworks and music, watermelons and burgers and beer.

This is no accident.

As founding father John Adams predicted 232 years ago, the signing of the Declaration of Independence "will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God almighty.

"It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore."

Adams vision on this point, certainly, was remarkably clear.

In many ways, the Fourth of July has become sort of a celebration of summer and family too, and those are worthwhile celebrations.

But as we celebrate today, please, let's also raise a flag.

It is good and necessary to remember the meaning of the day.

Let's remember the courage and sacrifice of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Each risked charges of treason by doing so. And each understood the weighty stakes of a war with England and the frightening challenge of creating a new government.

In that long war of independence, 4,435 Americans gave, as Abraham Lincoln would have characterized it, their last full measure of devotion.

Let's pause on this day to reflect on those sacrifices. And on the sacrifices of 620,000 other Americans who died in the wars that have followed.

Let's observe the day by remembering, as the saying goes, that freedom isn't free.

And for posterity's sake and ours, let's remember the eloquent and historic words of Thomas Jefferson, edited by the Continental Congress, that open the Declaration of Independence:

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

"That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

"Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.

"The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states."

May this great anniversary festival be meaningful to you.