There's an odd mood in the air. Those who know are both grim and giddy.
It's done.
The long argument about Independence is over. At least the Americans finally know what they want and where they stand.
The members of Parliament are still blissfully unaware, arrogant, already counting the American tax money they assessed in an effort to make Americans pay for the Thirty Years War in Europe.
After all, who could expect those Upstart Colonials to do anything but kneel and bow under? Nobody, but "the Colonials" themselves.
Fettered by British treaties, oppressed by British Regulations, impoverished by British taxes and import tariffs, they've had enough. It isn't the first time that they have voiced their complaints. The records of the British Parliament are replete with dozens of protests and petitions --- all unheeded.
So now it has come to this, a bloody war, that will drag on for eight years, winter and summer, until the British surrender at Yorktown.
Right now, today, on July 3, all of that seems a million miles away. It's only a seed stirring in the warm wet Earth, the beginning of an idea taking root --- a dream not of liberty granted by a King, but instead, a dream of freedom.
What a concept? Every man's home his castle? Every State Citizen, the Ruler of a kingdom?
Yet this is the American Ideal that was sprouting on July 3rd, the day before the formal announcement and publication of The Declaration of Independence, a wild, thrilling, improbable, infinitely exciting ideal.
Men at peace with their neighbors. Men set free of the intrigues and demands of governments and petty tyrants. A government designed to serve, rather than be served.
Imagine that? At the time, it was a concept so radical that Europeans hearing it, laughed.
Determined to share their own misery, these same European politicians hardly blinked nor gave two thoughts to the American Ideal as they continued their own obsessive drive to colonize the rest of the world --- and do it by any means possible.
By war, by deceit, by genocide, by whatever means at all, they, the so-called Elite, continued their "crusade" to claim dominance over the globe, and they snubbed the foolish, gullible Americans.
When the rest of the world finally said, "No!" to Colonialism and forced them to give up their ill-gotten holdings and to dissolve their lucrative Commonwealths, they simply switched gears and jurisdictions and went merrily onward.
Colonialism might be dead, might be a bad word, but Commercial Feudalism was the new game in town and the Great Game continued; only the names and natures of the Players were changed, not the goals.
Now instead of Kings and Queens and Principalities, the same Players would mask themselves as corporations and do battle in the commercial forum. Mercenary armies would become the vogue. Hordes of middlemen would be employed. The names, relationships, and ownership interests would be obscured.
The silly sleeping Public would hardly be aware of their Doom as chattel belonging to corporate interests.
It's the Third of July again.
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