On July 4, 1776, several politically powerful men representing the thirteen American colonies sat down at a table in the Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and applied their names to a revolutionary and subversive document, entitled The Declaration of Independence.
That document had been several years in the making, and was based in part on the ideas put forth in a previous document, written in 1774 by the young Virginian politician, Thomas Jefferson, and entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America. In that document, Jefferson made a suggestion that shocked many of the most powerful politicians in the American colonies.
 The colonies had, for many years already, been protesting the British policy of levying taxes on the colonies without allowing those same colonies any representation in the British Parliament in London. The catch phrase often used in those American protests was “taxation without representation.”
What Jefferson proposed in A Summary View, however, was even more subversive. Jefferson suggested that the American colonies had been settled by “free inhabitants of the British Dominions of Europe” — saying, in essence, that the American settlers were not bound to follow the unjust laws of the British crown, but had a God-given right to make their own political decisions.
“America was conquered, and her settlements made, and firmly established, at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public,” Jefferson wrote. “Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.”
Two years later, this subversive idea — that the American colonies were not beholden to the British crown in any manner whatsoever — formed the central premise of the Declaration of Independence.
It’s difficult for us modern Americans to grasp, after 222 years of representative government, how controversial Jefferson’s proposal was when he wrote it in 1774. European culture — the culture from which the American colonists drew their belief systems — had long held, as sacred, the right of each country’s King to levy taxes in, and to control the trade going to and from, the European colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Jefferson’s shocking proposal raised the question:
Just because we came from Europe to this new land, are we then necessarily subject to unjust European laws?
The consideration of that question led to a war with Great Britain lasting eight years — and ultimately to the creation of a new country that called itself “the United States of America.” But the separation — and the justifications for that separation — had been discussed in the colonies for many years prior.
This year, as I look forward to another July 4th celebration in Pagosa Springs — a community parade, a carnival and art show in the Town Park, a fireworks display at the High School athletic field — I find myself facing some very personal questions about my own “independence.”
After 32 years of marriage, my wife Clarissa and I have filed for a divorce. This decision flies in the face of a vow we both made, back on a cold and snowy January evening in 1977 — a promise that we would remain partners, come what may, until death do us part. We are breaking that vow — as so many other Americans are doing nowadays — and heading off into an uncertain future as two independent individuals.
Like the Revolutionary War and the American colonies final political separation from Great Britain, our divorce was a long time coming, and had often been discussed and contemplated — even threatened, on occasion — during those 32 years.
It’s not been easy for us to come to this decision. We both felt, back in 1977, that our vow to remain married “for better or worse” was a vow made, not just to each other, but to our future children — and to God.
We’ve had to deal with losing a sense of pride — a pride shared to some degree by our children — about having remained together for over three decades, during which time we watched so many of our friends’ marriages crumble and dissolve.
America in 2009 is a somewhat different place from what it was in 1977 — and certainly radically different from what it was in 1776. Through my personal struggle toward my own independence, I find myself questioning many of the basic premises behind the institution of marriage. I look around at America’s older retired couples like my own parents, living on their own, in many cases thousands of miles away from their children and grandchildren. I wonder whether this modern model — one man and one woman, living on a meager pension, and isolated from their own families and from the broader community at least partly by their own commitment to a decades-old promise — is really the best we can come up with.
Do we need, today, a modern and equally revolutionary Thomas Jefferson to suggest a different way to conceive our very personal unions? Is personal independence — between formerly married men and women — a sign of our culture’s moral failure, or a sign of something better on the horizon?
In 1776, thirteen separate British colonies banded together and formed a new type of federation along the east coast of North America. Perhaps that was the only way they could survive the loss of the British protection and economic connections that had, after all, come as a result of those unjust taxes. "Independence" for the American colonists meant a separation from Great Britain, but it also meant a much more "interdependent" relationship among the states themselves.
As I look around me, on this Independence Day, 2009, I wonder what new type of “family” I can create for myself here in Pagosa Springs.
And I wonder about Clarissa, and her own willingness to find a new "family," now that the old one is gone. |