How Many More Birthdays Does America Have Left?

As America celebrates its 233rd birthday, it is worth taking a moment to ask, How many more birthdays does America have left?

The fireworks burn bright. The flags wave high. There are proud salutes and marching bands. There are hot dogs and frankfurters. But those are the trappings, and what is inside them? Yesterday I passed by numerous smoking grills, fireworks and cheerful families. There was only one minor detail wrong. The flag that hung behind them was the Puerto Rican flag, not the American flag.

One minor detail that showcases how little easy it is to throw away the substance of America, when you have already replaced everything meaningful with empty showmanship. When you have done that, throwing out the few things that remain becomes very easy. Absurdly easy then to wrap socialism or communism in the red, white and blue, to shoot off firework displays around it while waving the flag. And when you do it long enough, no one will even bother to notice whose flag it is you're waving.

A news headline reads, "Tea party protests marr independence day". As if Independence Day were not there precisely for things such as the Tea Party protests, more than for consuming fast food, watching the lights in the sky and cheering when an unelected socialist leader delivers his carefully scripted address. But that is how a nation falls. That is how a nation dies. Before its cities burn and its name dies, its soul dies first. And when the soul is dead, all that is left is a corpse being propped upright by the cheering crowds.

How many birthdays then does America really have left? Every birthday is also a mark of mortality. A time to look ahead and wonder, "when?" The Roman Republic endured for almost 500 years, twice as long as America has to date. The Empire that succeeded it could not even manage 450 years. Many historians expected America to follow the Roman pattern, going from Republic to Empire. Instead America seems to have skipped over the heyday of the Empire to hurry forward to its waning twilight years.

Like many democracies America has indeed fallen prey to a "Bread and Circuses electorate", which as always vote in corrupt governments willing to promise grand scale giveaways at someone else's expense. But the retreat from Empire means that American socialism is not premised on looting and raiding other people's lands, but rather domestic wealth redistribution.

There is a shadow over America, but it is a shadow cast by a tottering monolith, the great edifice of government being erected higher and higher by hundreds of millions of willing and unwilling slaves, sweating and toiling for the promise of "better and cheaper everything brought to you by the government of the United States."

America has become an Empire, but not an Empire that rules over foreign lands, but an Empire of bureaucracy, of endless departments and administrations, of mountains of paper forms and ant-hives of regulators, organizers, inspectors and administrators. The American experiment of freedom and self-government has been conquered and overthrown by legions of bureaucrats, its population chained by a myriad of regulations and its dream of the "land of the free" twisted into a nightmare. And below all the offices promising "free bread" and collecting endless taxes to pay for it, are the circuses, the tawdry celebrity carnivals, the sleazy smirk of Hollywood and the endless scream of Reality TV echoing among concrete canyons, sprawling suburbs and dusty hills.

Chained below the mountain of paper are ideas and words like "initiative", "innovation", "industry" and "a government of the people by the people." Somewhere beneath that great pile of paper lie a few stray documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But they are just papers at the bottom of the pile, much less regarded than the forms and regulations that weigh them down and bury them. They are simply "traditions", like the flag and the firecrackers. And traditions without meaning quickly become disposable.

Yet these documents are not just traditions, they were meant to define its principles and place limits on its government to insure that Americans would be a free people living in a free land, rather than living out the sad mockery of the home of the fee and the land of the slave that Obama and his ilk mean to turn it into.

And when those documents are paid tribute to, but not read, and certainly not governed by. Then they can just as easily be replaced by other documents and the fiat of activist judges. And when the flag is simply viewed as an arrangement of colors and shapes, rather than representing the unity of individual states within a system of federated states... it is easy enough to replace it with any other flag, whether it is the Puerto Rican flag, the Mexican flag or the U.N. flag.

And that is exactly how to kill the soul of a nation and how to destroy America. The soul of a nation lie in its principles, its laws and its history. When those are dead, all that remain are symbols that no one will know how to read anymore, just as most people ignore the symbols on coins and dollar bills, or the statues leaning against ancient government buildings. The greatest ally of tyranny is ignorance. Its second greatest ally is greed.

To survive, to live to see many more birthdays, Americans must triumph over those who voted in the name of ignorance and greed, not to mention socialist self-righteousness. Whether or not America will survive to see a 300th birthday will depend on whether the nation's steps will move toward rebirth or redefinition.

Those who have placed Obama upon his pedestal have been working toward redefinition for a very long time. To see an American in Name Only, a nation with no values or principles, but diversity and centralization. Their America will be a mockery of the United States of America, just as the debauchery and degeneracy of Imperial Rome was a mockery of the Roman Republic.

For America to not only survive, but to thrive as a nation following in the footsteps of its Founders, whose Independence celebrations are not a hollow cocktail of diversity without principle of substance, America must be reborn along the standards of its founding documents. Only going back to America's roots can save America from the crimes of its leaders and the folly of its youth.