Thank you, Great Britain

We have friends, a newlywed couple, visiting from out of town this weekend. The wife is one of my wife's closest friends, who grew up with her. Her husband is an Englishman from Yorkshire, who she met in New Orleans.

And today is the Fourth of July. This morning, as I was getting out the American flag, I said to myself, "I hope Jerry doesn't mind." Jack asked me why that mattered, and I explained that Jerry is British.

But then I told Jack, as I brought the flag outside, "Actually, in a way, we owe the British our thanks."

Why?

Because it was, in part, the British who taught us the meaning of freedom. Much of the American system government draws some of its inspiration from the British and the tradition of individual rights that can be traced all the way back to the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.

By the way, the backstory on that is that the King John who was forced to sign the Magna Carta is the same vilified Prince John who lost in his attempt the usurp the throne of Richard the Lionhearted. But then that pesky little Robin Hood upset his plans. What most people don't know is that later Richard died and John took the throne anyway.

Anyway, back to the American Revolution.

It was because of that tradition of freedom and a developing sense of democracy that the colonists in America saw themselves as deserving the full rights of other British subjects.

But when the Crown began to impose unfair taxes on the colonists - to pay the debts from the French and Indian War - the colonists cried "Foul!"

In a sense, our rebellion began out of a desire to restore fairness in an unjust system. At first, ours was not so much a revolution to change the world, but to restore a status quo.

But of course there was more to it than that. The influence of French thinkers, but also English thinkers like John Locke, inspired one of the great conclusions by a political body: "That all men are created equal."

Had we not had learned our lessons well from the British, through their democratic traditions and their period of unjust rule, we may not have reached that insight and we may not have become the nation we are today.