Fourth of July thoughts

Fourth of July will be celebrated across the heartland on Wednesday.

For those of who have desk jobs it means a day off although we recognize that many of our trusted readers are going to continue a day of checking livestock, cutting wheat on the plains (in select areas) and doing assorted field work.

However, many readers also understand the importance of a little fun time, if possible. Communities become the focus of road races, parades, turtle races, mud volleyball, watermelon feeds and old-fashioned fireworks.

If you grow up on the plains there are some rules that fall into place quickly. If the Fourth fell during the weekend many more people traveled out of town. In a drought if you bought fireworks you might not be able to shoot them as a result of a burn ban.

Rural and urban dwellers took burn bans seriously as a stubble fire could become a nightmare.  Thirty or 40 years ago there were many more people who lived on the farm who could respond to a fire. Unless you live on the fringe of a town with a full-time fire department, fighting a fire is more challenging than ever.

Still, fireworks and Fourth of July activities are as Americana as it can get. At times I’ve wondered why we don’t call it Independence Day holiday and float it on a Friday Monday. It would make family gatherings easier for travel and holiday planning easier.

Yet, I recognize that is the selfish side of me. Our forefathers wrote strongly about the challenges they faced in the Declaration of Independence Day, the “signature document” that got it all started for us. Even in tough times the entire document is worth reading again.

With credit to the National Archives and Records Administration, here are the opening paragraphs that make me proud:

In Congress, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, 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. …