A What-If Fourth of July

It is Fourth of July weekend. This is the time we annually celebrate the glory of our revolutionary past. This year, it coincides with a time when we are also re-evaluating  that past; when we are deciding which monuments to our reconsidered history must now be removed. 

So, this is as good a time as any to re-evaluate the 4th of July itself.

I have posed a counter-factual question to people over the years: was it a good or a bad thing for us to have fought the Revolution? Of course, such a question is initially considered blasphemous. Can you imagine what the national anthem kneeling-haters would say? Give the question a minute, though. 

Suppose we never removed ourselves from the British. Suppose we remained part of the Commonwealth. Would that have been so bad? Canada stayed. Australia stayed. Is life in those places so horrible? Not to mention England itself, even its food has gotten much better. 

And what might have happened had we stayed British? Well, one thing we know is that slavery was abolished in England and its colonies in 1833. If we had remained a colony, there would have been no reason to fight over slavery some 30 years later in that thing we call, “The Civil War.” No Civil War would mean that the 620,000 people who died in that tragedy would not have had to. What could some of those 620,000 lives contributed to the world had they not been snuffed out in a cause that, had we not fought the Revolution, would not have been necessary? No way to know, but presumably something good. It also goes without saying (although I’m saying it) that earlier abolition would have been much appreciated by the slaves.

And how powerful would England have been had we remained part of that country? Very possibly, it would have been powerful enough to have deterred the European intra-mural squabble that became World War I. Early 20^thcentury Germany may have thought twice about attacking an England that included what would have been its then potent American colonies.  As it turned out, when those colonies – as the United States – did enter that war, Germany was, in fact, defeated.

And history tells us that an important trigger for World War II was Germany’s lost sense of pride because of its World War I defeat. This condition was capitalized on by Mr. Hitler to achieve power and give us the Holocaust and World War II. So, no World War I means no German defeat, means no German loss of pride, means no Hitler, means no Holocaust and no World War II.  

Does our Revolution still seem like such a good idea?

Now, I know that these historical counter-factuals are sheer supposition. So many factors enter into why things happen that no single event can change everything. History is not dominoes. There is also the possibility that it was our Revolution that was the catalyst for many of the moves toward freedom in other countries and that those changes may not have happened, or, at least, been delayed had we kept drinking tea, eating crumpets and calling soccer “football”. 

Some may think that my suppositions here are pretty far-fetched. I would argue (in fact, I am arguing) that they are not far-fetched but are, at the most, simply fetched. While there is certainly no guarantee that what I lay out here would have occurred, there is also no guarantee that it wouldn’t have.

So, as the fireworks explode and the bands play God Bless America and, for some reason the 1812 Overture, a Russian composed tribute to their defeat of Napoleon, look north to Canada and think about trading Trump for Trudeau. 

[Note: As this blog was being written, our Orange Leader gave a speech on land that the Supreme Court in 1980 declared had been illegally stolen from Native Americans. While standing on that fruit of American crime, he gave a speech that extolled our wonderful history. He condemned those whom he said were conducting a “merciless campaign to wipe out our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” As usual, The Man Who Would Be King could not have been more wrong. This blog, for example, while questioning the impact of the American Revolution, is written in the very spirit of that Revolution – in the spirit of what is best about our people. It is written as an examination, however cursory, of how we may have even better achieved the fundamental principles that we enshrine as “self-evident.”]