(Editorial - Graphic Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

Today we celebrate the beginning for our country — the moment we adopted our Declaration of Independence and set out on the bumpy road to our own brand of freedom.

We’ll be swimming, grilling, holding parades, watching fireworks and enjoying ourselves this summer day — and bask in the security of knowing we are free to do so. It is vital we remember, too, that from its founding this country has protected the rights of those who show their love of country by hoping to make it better.

In fact, perhaps today is an opportunity to read that Declaration of Independence. It is full of sentiments many of even the most patriotic have forgotten our founders held dear.

For example, among the founders’ criticisms of King George III was “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

They weren’t thrilled with the bureaucracy, either, complaining that the king “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people …”

What would they think of us today? Would we be proud to show them what we have done with the country they founded? On the other hand, would we be proud of how much of what is happening today would be familiar to those with the socio-cultural standards of the late 18th Century?

Would they recognize us as a people who “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?”

Celebrate today, ladies and gentlemen. Celebrate this wonderful, complicated mosaic of a country, for which those founders took an unprecedented risk; and in which there was division and squabble even at the beginning we honor today.

Celebrate that we are free — and that we can, as did those men 246 years ago, aim higher.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!