Happy Independence Day, U.S.A !

My country
'Tis of thee, sweet Land of Liberty,
Of thee I sing.

I've always considered myself fortunate, even "blessed," to have been born in the United States. While I haven't always agreed with all of my government's policy decisions, I can't think of anyplace I'd rather live.

When any American citizen tells another, "if you don't like it, why don't you move to [x]" (where [x] represents some other nation or group of nations, usually communist or totalitarian in nature), I can only shake my head in disgust. We can speak out because we live in the U.S.A.; it is a well-worn national tradition. Both Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the very act of dissent to be a display of patriotism. Dissent is not only a patriotic act: it is in fact the duty of any American who sees problems within our government. If T.R. said so (and he did), then I'm perfectly willing to go along.

What is unpatriotic (some, including myself, would even call it seditious) is the blanket proclamation that disagreement and dissent weakens our government and strengthens our enemies. Those who espouse the "no dissent" platform display a profound ignorance of our nation's political and philosophical underpinnings. The same can be said for the legions who insist that we were founded as a "Christian Nation" (simply because most of the Founding Fathers were devout Christians), despite the Constitutional prohibition of a "National Religion". To declare the United States to be a "Christian Nation" (with the implication that Christianity is the preferred or superior faith) is to defy our Constitution and the intentions of our Founding Fathers.

I won't bother mentioning any of the public figures who have espoused the foul opinions described in the above paragraph; most of us have heard about at least some of them over the past decade or so. For, if I mentioned any of those I can recall on the spur of the moment, I could be accused of a partisan bias. One must admit, however, that the faulty logic regarding dissent and national faiths seems to come from one side only.

It is said that the man who protests his innocence the loudest should be watched the closest. The same thing goes for the man who proclaims his patriotism in the loudest voice.