We’re celebrating…what was it?

What exactly is it that our national holiday tomorrow, July 4^th 2020, is in celebration of? According to my elementary school teachers, the answer was simple: the signing of our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Independence from what or whom? From that oppressive tyrant, the king of England, of course. And what was it about that tyranny that was so darned oppressive? We were told that it was something called “taxation without representation.”

And what exactly was “taxation without representation?” That was something of a mystery. Taxation I had a vague understanding of.  It was something my parents had to deal with once a year, involving a lot of papers strewn across the kitchen table. I had the impression that dealing with taxes was a dull, necessary task, but my parents didn’t seem particularly upset by it.

So the “without representation” part must have been the key. This part was particularly fuzzy to us schoolchildren. Some of us may have vaguely understood that the issue had to do with paying money to the government but not having any say about what that government did. Still, by itself, it seemed a rather abstract issue over which to pick up a musket and start shooting at, and get shot by, redcoats. But I never questioned the right or wrong of it. A whole body of patriotic hymns, poems, monuments and paintings celebrated our revolution, so it must have been for a glorious cause. Those revolutionaries fought, and many died, for our freedom. How could anyone question that?

But many things were left unexamined or unexplained. The whole issue of slavery, for example, and the fact that many of our “founding fathers” owned slaves in large numbers, and had no intention of awarding any of them “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Another contradiction gradually dawned on me in the long years since I attended Sam Houston elementary school in Denton, Texas. If the fact that we Americans enjoy freedom and self-determination is owing to the bloody revolution fought by our ancestors, then what about Canada? They don’t seem to be miserably oppressed subjects of tyranny. Are they all just pretending to be as happy, or happier, than we are? Or is it that they, unlike Americans, are perfectly OK with being serf-like subjects of a rank monarchy? It sure seems like they govern themselves anyway, to the same extent that we govern…us. And without a shot being fired.

How can that be? Because if those Canadians are a happy, democratic people, then that suggests that our revolution was…unnecessary. No way!

But as a thought exercise, let’s imagine that the American Revolution had never taken place, and that the colonies had continued as colonies of Great Britain and that their history had followed a course similar to that of Canada. Would we now be better off, or worse?

Let’s look at slavery. Great Britain outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and banned slavery in its colonies outright in 1833. It thus ended slavery a full 32 years before the U.S. did – again, without a shot being fired. This was accomplished by paying enormous sums of public money in compensation to colonial slaveholders.

What if America had remained a part of Britain, subject to the same deal? 32 years of slavery would have been avoided. And since there were about 4 million slaves in the U.S. when the Civil War began, we are talking about something like 128 million person-years of slavery that never would have happened.

And not only that, but there would not have been a Civil War. Over 600,000 deaths would have been avoided.

Healthcare? According to the LA Times in an article this year, Canada spends one-fourth per capita on healthcare compared to the US.  Yet—claims the same article—Canadians are about as healthy as Americans.

Gun violence? In a big-government, gun-restricting country like Canada, there must be a lot of armed criminals and woefully unarmed law-abiding citizens, right? Yet the U.S. has approximately 4.5 gun-related deaths per 100,000 citizens per year…while in Canada it’s only about 0.5!

But who cares about these big-government socialistic perks…what we’re talking about here is freedom, right? That’s what we’re celebrating. Freedom of expression, of the press, of assembly, of religion.

Well, last time I checked, every Canadian woke up this morning in a free country, every bit as free as ours. And they somehow obtained their freedom without the death of approximately 24,000 of their own citizen-soldiers killed in action or due to disease or during imprisonment by the enemy.

And I have to say, in comparing the two heads of state that our two peoples have used their democracy to put in charge, it’s kind of looking like they are using their freedom more wisely than we are.

So at the risk of sounding un-American, I’m still not clear on what we’re so worked up about on this day.

Even if we have Starbuck’s and they have Tim Horton’s.