I feel independent today.

Yesterday the 30th rendition of our local annual summer festival, Bay Day, fell on Independence Day. It was a day with far more than fireworks in St. Albans Town Bay Park in northwestern Vermont; it was a family day with a triathalon, lakefront games, sports, fair food, fireworks, and continuous live music. I book the music.

The Summer Sounds concert series starts on Bay Day each year and our kickoff yesterday was inspired. Carol Ann Jones and The Superchargers performed an Independence Day tribute.

Ms. Jones sang an Irving Berlin song at the end of her third set. God Bless America is the unofficial national anthem of the United States. Andre Maquera closed the show as the fireworks flew with a guitar solo of the Star Spangled Banner. In front of the stage, on his knees in the single spotlight, he shot down enemy rockets with his guitar and we heard the guns firing.

Inspiring.

Independence doesn’t come cheaply. Specialist Ryan Grady, 25, of West Burke was killed by an IED near Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan last week. “He made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of a nation that he both loved and served” as a member of the Vermont Army National Guard, Maj. Gen. Michael Dubie said. He is the first Vermonter to be killed since the National Guard deployed.

We dedicated the concert to the Vermont Guard and we remembered Ryan Grady when the fireworks lit the darkened sky.

I feel particularly independent today of the bozos who want my town to take down its Christmas tree but won’t dare to offend anyone who would have an ayatollah take over City Hall. According to the Huff Post, President Obama “rebuked the old chestnut that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation” during a press conference he held in Turkey last year.

That old chestnut ?

I’m not very religious in an organized way but I went to Sunday School and drilled the catechism. I can recite the Apostle’s Creed and I know the Lord’s Prayer with and without the doxology, with debtors or with trespassers. That said, the evangelicals worry me. Pretty much anyone who trespasses against me does. If you, dear reader, didn’t understand this paragraph, we have little to talk about.

See, I also know that the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence knew somebody’s God was lurking in our founding and I know that the 1892 Supreme Court decision that “this is a Christian nation” affirmed it.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator…

On the one hand, I’m very glad the Ayatollah Obama is not the head of the state church. On the other hand, it worries me that the ayatollahs of godlessness would assure that our kids grow up without the cultural teachings that make us the Good Guys. America is changing from a strong, independent leader to a nation of appeasers.

“Dear Mr./Ms. Bozo:
I don’t mind offending you. Nope, I don’t mind that at all.
Sincerely,
Me.”

Ryan Grady didn’t die because of oil no matter what some evangelical trespassers might think. Ryan Grady died so those bozos could say out loud that this nation never heard of God.