It's America's birthday once again, and it is for me a poignant time.  I love our country.  Whenever I travel abroad, near or far, I am always happy to come home to this, the greatest country not only on earth but ever in history.  We need to remind ourselves of this fact.  We are the greatest country in history, period.

Oh, there have been, many, many so-called "Great" empires led by leaders who have fixed grandiose titles on themselves.  Caesar's Rome, Napoleon's France, Elizabeth's England, Genghis Khan's Mongolia/China, Peter and Catherine's Russia, heck I could go on and on back to David's Israel and beyond, but all of those cultures and countries have long lost their greatness which if you look at it carefully is no big loss as they were never that great to begin with.  I mean, what was meant by historians when the affixed the term "Great" to a leader or country?  Almost always it was a sobriquet of conquest and domination, not freedom and imagination.  No, only one great country in history has been great because of the celebration of its people's freedoms, its determination to spread that freedom to all peoples of the world, and the unrelenting creativity and dynamic force of a free people unleashed to enjoy the fruits of their free labor and that country is the United States of America.  God, I love this country!

But on this particular birthday I am concerned that we have, as a people, taken our freedom for granted as something that is essentially unbreakable and ever present as opposed to what it is, fragile and in need of constant nurturing.  We have been for decade, slowly but steadily surrendering our freedoms to the government in the name of security and protection, and worst of all, fairness and equality.  We elect leaders who promise to provide those two things, they develop well-meaning programs to provide the benefit they promised when they ran, but in the end, the result is always the same: thousands of new regulations now totaling in the millions and each on chipping away at our freedom.  There are rules for everything and the sheer weight of these rules, all developed with good intention I concede, is what is burying us and will be our undoing if we don't reverse course.

On this American birthday I think it would be wonderful if we remember a simple truth: Security does not exist in nature and is an illusion.  In other words, all of this protection and equality that we have been trying to legislate and build is all for nothing.  We have only succeeded in burying ourselves under mountains of red tape, adding to it each day, and if we are not very careful one day we could all wake up and find our nation and its goals gone.  If you think this is too drastic to consider, you have not read history.  Another word for all of this pursuit of equality is decadence.  We have become decadent taking our past success for granted, forgetting that it is freedom with all of its pleasures and yes, pain, that has brought us this far and we surrender it at our peril.   America could vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind if we don't wise up and fast.  We are witnessing nothing less than the beginning of the end at this very moment.  I for one would be sick if we allowed it to happen.

So let's make this birthday a celebration of the best thing America stands for, Freedom!  The freedom to live our lives as we see fit, to enjoy the successes we earn for ourselves, to accept that with freedom and success comes failure and pain but it is impossible to separate success from failure.  We must accept and in fact revel in the fact that if you try and take away failure you inevitably erase success along with it.  If you try to eliminate pain, you take pleasure away with it.  If you try to make everyone equal, you instead make everyone into a kind of gray nothing without creativity or expression.

Happy Birthday America!  Let's start being the rugged individualistic and free country that we once were and are increasingly no longer are.  From crisis can come great things.  Thomas Jefferson said that it is healthy for a country to have a revolution every so often.  We haven't had one for a long, long time.  The time has come for us to revolt once again against the oppressive and stifling enemies of freedom who claim to make us safer but are instead destroying the very thing that makes us great. Get involved and help put us back on course.  We can do it because we are Americans!