Looking Back

When I was in the 6th grade, I had a teacher--Mrs. Ferguson--that fully believed that learning should be fun. Throughout the year we participated in several different simulations, one was called Math Land, one of them was modeled after the Greek city-states, and one was an enactment of the Iditarod race. Then there was the simulation we did of the American Revolution.


Mrs Ferguson split the class up into Patriots, Loyalists, and Undecideds. The setting was a Congressional Congress where Patriots and Loyalists would debate about what action to take in regards to England. If we were Patriots, we faithfully fought for the independence, if we were Loyalists, we faithfully fought for continued reliance on the mother country all the while trying to sway the undecided representatives to our side. The culmination of our speeches, debates, and forums was a final vote on whether or not to separate from England.

I remember with triumph that day when as a class, we decided to separate from England. I'm not sure we fully understood what it meant when we adopted the Declaration of Independence, though we had spent weeks debating the subject. Still, we were excited that we had as a class reached the same decision our founding fathers had reached on the fateful day in July.

As I was reading in our textbook, Give Me Liberty! I saw a parallelism between the colonists and my 6th grade class. I don't think the founding fathers knew in full what it meant to declare independence from England. There were a few that we look at and say "they must have had a greater vision than their own", but I doubt they ever saw the complete picture. I think that as a whole, American colonists had no idea what they were getting themselves into, just that they needed to do it.

As I watched Obama's inauguration address and noted his integration of history with our future, I felt the same kind of excitement I felt in my 6th grade class when we decided to separate from England, the excitement that in a small way must have been felt by every representative in that Congress meeting on that summer day in 1776. An excitement about liberty. A liberty that doesn't quite exist anywhere else, at least not yet. And finally, not a static, flat liberty, but an expanding and ever growing liberty. I really do feel blessed to live in the United States of America.