Across the country today family and friends are gathering for picnics and parties. This evening cities throughout the nation will be painting the night skies with fantastical displays of fireworks and light( the most phenomenal of which, by the way, are put on by Zambelli Fireworks in Pittsburgh). Today is July 4th, Independence Day and while Americans of all stripes are grilling burgers and digging into apple pie and oohing and ahhing at colorful splashes of fire in the night sky, I ponder just how many of these people really know what they are celebrating today and do they really understand why? I think the answer to that is no.

We’ve come a long way since 1776 when the Founders of this great nation declared us an independent people, free from the abuse and treachery at the hands of the British. But, after 232 years have we simply traded that foreign tyranny for a domestic? When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence he envisioned a society based on individual freedom and liberty. It was a society where anybody was free to choose their own destiny, to provide for themselves and their family, and achieve unlimited opportunity and where charity was a personal decision based on the kindness of one’s heart and the giving of others, but those days are well behind us.

You see, in today’s America an ever growing, overreaching government has bastardized that foundation and sent us down a path where it has become barely recognizable. In today’s America we are told by the state how, what and where to educate our children. Today we live in an America where our free speech is censored be it deemed too insensitive to others’ ears. We are told our moral faiths which have remained constant for thousands of years are hateful and bigoted. In today’s America our highest court gives precedent, to corporate conglomerates, our private land rights allowing them to snatch them away if they can better feed the state’s mammoth apatite than that of a working family. In today’s Land of the Free the prosperity of your average American is stunted by the theft of your labors at the hands of the collective. Today, you’re average American works until May just to pay the government. Indeed, we have truly strayed from the concepts of individualism and unlimited achievement. The Founders revolted over much less than this.

Now we are in another election year and half of our country’s voters are cheering on a full blown Marxist who uplifts them with promises of suckling off the rewards of the other half who have lived and exemplified the American dream, all under the guise of a spurious sense of “fairness” and the “greater good.” The other half have aligned themselves with a man who will continue to dredge us through several more years of death and struggle abroad in the name of nation building under the fraudulent notion of “safety” and “security.” Don’t you dare question it either. Surely, this is not what General Washington fought for in the American Revolution, nor General Grant in the Civil War. It is certainly not the America my grandfather defended in World War II nor the country my father served under in Vietnam.

I am certainly not ungrateful for what I have. I think too many Americans are ignorant as to how good we have it here compared to most of the world, but as each year passes I find less to celebrate. Perhaps I am too cynical, but I find it sad to see so many of my fellow countrymen sit back and willingly enable and cheer on a burgeoning bureaucratic beast as it swallows whole so much of what is rightly ours. I would like to believe that America’s best days still await, but I fear they are long gone.

[UPDATE - Langley]: Sam, while I agree with the sentiment here, I also agree with Erick at Red State that despite all of the flaws that we are surrounded by and the challenges we face, days like today are worth celebrating and recommit ourselves to fighting to restore the First Principles that the Declaration of Independence represented, and that our Founders pledged their lives and sacred honor to fight for.