This is the Day of Independence

We were Brits.

We served the King of England.

Only we had no say in our own destiny.

More and more rules and regulations were placed upon us without regard for our needs, only for the King's needs and the England over which he ruled.

And his particular brand of religion.

If a person did not believe as he believed, that person had no opportunity to advance as a citizen.

We were restricted in what we could do and what we could become.

There were some of us who had a vision of freedom.

That freedom centered around our desire to worship when, where and how we pleased, and to have control of our own affairs.

We asked the King to let it be so.

He said, "No deal."

But we strongly believed that God had ordained that people should be free. Else why was there this longing for freedom in the breast of every man?

After much consideration, we decided that being free from the bonds of a government far away, that did not have our interests at heart, was worth even bloodshed.

So we fought for freedom against a nation ten times more powerful than us.

The odds were stacked against us.

During the battles there were countless situations that should have gone bad for our troops.

But through hunger, inclimate weather, and every kind of disadvantage one could imagine, we fought, all the time seeing our leaders, even our generals, on the front lines kneeling in prayer to a mighty and just God.

Guarding the entrance to Baltimore harbor via the Patapsco River Fort McHenry faced almost certain attack by British forces.

On the morning of September 13, 1814, British bomb ships began hurling high-trajectory shells toward Fort McHenry from positions beyond the reach of the fort's guns. The bombardment continued throughout the rainy night.

Awaiting news of the battle's outcome was a Washington, D.C., lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who had visited the enemy's fleet to secure the release of a Maryland doctor, who had been abducted by the British after they left Washington.

During the night, there had been only occasional sounds of the fort's guns returning fire. At dawn, the British bombardment tapered off.

Had the fort been captured?

Key wondered, "O say, can you see, by the dawns early light, what so proudly we hailed a the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight or the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?"

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting air gave proof through the night that OUR flag was still there.

O say! Does that start spangled banner yet wave o're the land of the free and the home of the brave?

In the end, the war against Britain was won by this rag-tag group of armed citizens calling ourselves "Americans."

Wanting never again to be bound to the laws of a foreign nation, and wishing to live freely, we formed a representative republic...a quasi democracy, laid down a charter by which it was to govern itself, and put specific restrictions on that government, saying, "These things the government must not do."

We called that latter portion of the charter "The Bill of Rights."

Not rights given to the citizens.

Rights the citizens already had, given by their creator, that the government could not take away.

Thus was constituted The United States of America.

And I ask you today, "O say! Does that star spangled banner yet wave o're the land of the free, and the home of the brave?"