We live in troubled times. Love of country is seen as the exclusive province of the closed-minded and Patriots are derided as jingoistic bombasts. The good that America has done and continues to do in the world is swept under the rug in favor of discussions on where our steps have faltered. The long list of our national accomplishments are pushed aside and only our mistakes are held up to the light of public scrutiny.

Two hundred thirty one years ago, 55 patriots, working under conditions of secrecy and in contravention of the instructions that had brought them together, voted for independence from Great Britain. Those colonials, mistreated and abused by the king’s government, launched the world’s greatest experiment in representative democracy. We fought a great civil war to determine if such a nation could endure. In the century just passed, we fought two world wars to ensure that this legacy of freedom did not perish and a long cold war that pitted America against the forces of an evil empire. Now, America’s bravest sons and daughters stand post in places with names like Kabul and Tikrit, just as their predecessors held the line in the la Drang Valley, at the Chosin Reservoir, in the snows of Bastogne, and the muddy trenches of the Marne.

Today is Independence Day and I remain committed to the proposition that our country, warts and all, remains the last, best hope of earth; that, as it was at the beginning, it is a shining city upon a hill.