Column: Working together in America means agreeing to disagree
Submitted by Brett Fisher on Tue, 07/04/2017 - 11:23am
Despite what so many Americans demand of lawmakers today, our country wasn't built so much on cooperation as it was people with differences learning to get along.
When the Second Continental Congress met in the Spring of 1776, its intention was to draw up a Declaration of Independence that would then be delivered to King George III of Great Britain as the colony's statement of autonomy.
But believe it or not, independence was neither a consensus among the founding generation nor a universal virtue.
Many American colonists of the time were not willing to rebel against the British crown, either because they were too loyal to the Mother Country, or else their own self-preservation was more important to them.
Members of the Second Continental Congress were no different.
Some of them outright dismissed the idea of independence as either treason or the surest and swiftest way to ruin.
Others, while supporting the concept of liberty, feared the wrath of the mighty British Empire. They were reticent to affix their names to a treasonous document that would assuredly sign their doom — and that of the colonies.
Still others, although sharing mutual zeal for independence, differed fundamentally on how to lead a rebellion against the world's foremost power.
They also disagreed on how to form and maintain a continental government in place of the British monarchy.
My point here is that there was plenty of disagreement within the Second Continental Congress, enough to stall the formation and drafting of a declaration of independence for months.
Today's Americans wouldn't tolerate this kind of government division. I hear and see a lot of chatter online and over the air waves about how American lawmakers need to work together to come up with solutions for the country.
And yet, it was because of this divisiveness that we have the Constitutional Republic that still exists 230 years later.
Political division — fundamental differences in philosophy — is a natural part of a free republic. Nothing worth working together on is ever easy or quickly achieved.
Birth pains and labor can last for hours. In similar fashion, legislation worth passing — that which preserves essential liberty and respects individual freedom — will take months or even years to achieve rather than hours, days and weeks.
I would personally be alarmed if Congressional republicans and democrats worked efficiently together to pass legislation in record time.
This doesn't mean that lawmakers can't work together or shouldn't cooperate under certain circumstances. But it does mean they don't compromise on what's universally important to Americans: liberty and freedom.
The Second Continental Congress is an object lesson in history for the rest of us to see how individuals so politically polarized and different still managed to piece together a patchwork of ideas that brought forth both a Declaration of Independence and a framework for a new nation.
At the height of political division in the Continental Congress, Benjamin Franklin once addressed the body saying, "Gentlemen, we might as well all hang together, because if we are caught, we will surely all hang separately."
This Fourth of July, I urge my country(wo)men to consider what is truly most important in the arena of ideas.
The one commonality I hope we all share is the same zeal for the preservation of freedom and essential liberty as our founders had to attain them.
