Independence Day

Welcome back to your lives.

Coming back on this Monday, tired, sun-burned, possibly hung over. What are you thinking about? How much fun you had this weekend? The 4th of July fireworks? All the beer?

What about your independence?

The whole point of colonizing the new world was to get away from the tyranny and to seek religious freedom. Freedom to be who we want to be and not lose our heads over it.

We've come a long way since then. We've basically wiped out a race of people, the American Indian. We have taken the people that used to populate most of this country, the Mexicans, and shoved them out. Forcing them to sneak back in to what was originally theirs, and then treating them like second class citizens.

Our so-called fore-fathers brought a race of people to this country as slaves. They burned people who were thought to be different from them, and treated women as vessels for their spawn.

Much has changed since most of us have been on this planet. At least in the "Good ol' US of A." We no longer have slaves. Women are equal. Unfortunately racism still exists, but it is slowly being replaced with enlightened youth. We know that skin color has no bearing on who a person is. We are the supposed melting pot of the world. "Give us your poor, your tired, your ambition"

Why, then, is it so hard to believe that two women or two men love each other enough to want to marry? And why is it so difficult to jut let them be? Does it hurt you in any way?

This fight to have the constitution changed, thus breaking the separation of Church and State, is most definitely not what our fore-fathers had in mind. There was a reason the Church and the State were to be kept separate: to keep the small minded people from controlling the nation.

Are we truly independent of the very thing we left in the first place? Religious persecution, the right to be who we are?

We haven't come nearly as far as we'd like to think.