Reflections on Liberty

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July holiday weekend celebrating America 250 - many without fireworks this year. We spent quality time with friends, worked in the backyard a bit, I smoked a tri-tip and friends loaded up the side dish table, and we hit the fireworks at City Park.

The last few weeks, as this milestone holiday approached, I've been reflective about where we've been - and where we're headed from here as a nation. One of the things I've really been bothered by is the vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I guess they're mad because Trump patched it up and made it look nicer? Hate the man if you want to - but please - leave my monuments alone.

The reflecting pool was built with the notion of reflection, and it was even nicknamed a "water mirror" when it was being built in 1922. It was the pool where hundreds of thousands of people watched as Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. And someone tried to break that mirror. How very sad.

When we think of things like Independence Day, and the Statue of Liberty - it always sounds good - but independence from what? - liberty for who? It's a long and complex journey, and for me - has some family points of pride, and so I'd like to take you for a bit of a tour - of liberty - and a part of my family tree.

Before we get to the family stuff - and trust me, we'll get there - let's go back. Way back.

The ancient Greeks were the first people to seriously wrestle with the idea that citizens might have a say in how they were governed. Athens, around 500 BC, experimented with a form of democracy that was genuinely radical for its time - and deeply imperfect. Women couldn't vote. Slaves had no voice. But the idea was planted: that a community of people could govern itself, rather than simply be ruled.

The Romans picked it up and built a Republic on it - with a Senate, separation of powers, and the concept of rule of law. For several centuries, it worked remarkably well. Then it didn't. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Augustus called himself Emperor, and Rome - the Republic, anyway - was over. The lesson the Romans left behind wasn't just their achievements. It was a warning: liberty is fragile, and it tends to erode from the inside.

Both of those lessons - the Greek spark and the Roman warning - would echo for the next two thousand years. The Founders knew them by heart.

Here's where it gets into my family tree.

My surname - Bear - is Old English. Anglo-Saxon, not German, though I spent years assuming it was a misspelled Bär before my father set me straight. Turns out, (according to my AI searcher-guy) the Bear name shows up in the Domesday Book of 1086 - William the Conqueror's great census of England - recorded as Bere. A century later, in 1168, the first known individual bearing the name appears in the Pipe Rolls of Devonshire: Ordric de Bera. The name likely came from places in southwest England - Devon and Dorset - where Old English words like bearu (a grove or wood) and baer (a swine pasture) gave farms and settlements their names, and families took their surnames from the land they worked.

So. Ordric de Bera. A man in Devon, 1168. What was his life like?

Not great, if we're being honest. In 12th century England, the vast majority of people were villeins - serfs, essentially - legally bound to the land they farmed and to the lord who owned it. They couldn't move, couldn't marry without their lord's permission, couldn't own property in any meaningful sense. Their labor belonged to someone else. The Norman conquest of 1066 had layered a French-speaking aristocracy over the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, and the gap between the powerful and the powerless was enormous. The idea that Ordric de Bera had rights - the same rights you and I take for granted on a Tuesday morning in Fort Collins - would have been laughable to him. He had obligations. His lord had rights.

And yet - something was stirring.

In 1215, a group of English barons, fed up with the tyranny of King John, forced him to sign a document at Runnymede that would echo through history: the Magna Carta. Most of it was about protecting the rights of nobles, not common people - so let's not over-romanticize it. But buried in it was a radical principle: that even a king is subject to the law. That arbitrary power has limits. That a ruler cannot simply imprison, seize, or destroy without due process.

It was a crack in the wall. A small one. But cracks have a way of growing.

For most of the next three centuries - the so-called Dark Ages and well into the medieval period - liberty as a concept was largely dormant. The Catholic Church and the feudal system between them organized European society into a rigid hierarchy, and questioning either one was dangerous business.

Then came Martin Luther, in 1517, nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg - and the world was never quite the same. The Reformation wasn't just a religious movement. It was a declaration that a person could read scripture, reason before God, and answer to their own conscience - without a king or a priest standing between them and truth. That idea - that individual conscience matters, that no earthly authority is absolute - was political dynamite dressed up in theology. And it spread like wildfire.

Nowhere did it spread with more consequence than in the Low Countries of northern Europe - a stretch of land called the Netherlands, governed at the time by the Spanish Empire, and filling up quickly with Protestants - and not just Lutherans - many were Calvinists - eww.

My great-grandfather Sebastian Bear married a woman with a Dutch surname: Helen Somsen. Her family's roots trace back to the northern Netherlands - Friesland, Groningen, Gelderland - the heartland of what may be the most underappreciated revolution in Western history.

The Somsen name is derived from the Dutch word soms, meaning "sometimes" or "occasionally" - a humble, quiet name from a humble, quiet part of the world. But those quiet Dutch provinces did something extraordinary. They stood up to the most powerful empire on earth and won.

In 1568, the Dutch provinces began their revolt against Spanish Habsburg rule - King Philip II of Spain, who had sent the brutal Duke of Alba to enforce Catholic orthodoxy and crush dissent. Alba's "Council of Blood" (the locals' nickname for his court) executed over a thousand people. The man who organized (and funded - as he had inherited his Spanish Catholic Uncle's wealth when he was 13) the resistance was a nobleman named William of Orange - known to history as William the Silent. He wasn't quiet because he was meek; he was called "silent" because he was legendarily careful about what he said and to whom. He was, by all accounts, one of the great political minds of his age. Today the Dutch call him the Pater Patriae - Father of the Fatherland.

William didn't live to see the Republic he was building. Declared an outlaw by the Spanish king in 1580, he was assassinated in his own home in Delft in 1584. But the revolt survived him - and after 80 years of fighting, the Dutch Republic emerged as something the world had never quite seen: a federation of self-governing provinces, with remarkable religious tolerance, freedom of trade, and a government accountable to its citizens rather than to a king.

Many historians regard the Dutch Republic as the world's first capitalist nation. Amsterdam was home to the world's first full-time stock exchange and became for a time, the richest city in the world - ever heard of the Dutch East India Company? It controlled the spice trade for decades and was worth trillions in today's dollars at one time.

And perhaps most remarkably - the Dutch Republic become the most religiously tolerant nation on earth at a time when that was nearly unheard of. You know who took refuge there, during his exile from England? A philosopher named John Locke. He arrived in the Netherlands with his ideas about natural rights - life, liberty, and property - and the free intellectual climate of the Dutch Republic helped shape them into the philosophy that would become the backbone of the American Declaration of Independence.

A Somsen ancestor living in Friesland in the 1600s was living in the middle of all of this - in the place where the idea of a free republic was being road-tested for the first time. That's something I'm proud of - and the love for liberty has carried through my family tree ever since.

Back in England, things were also coming to a fresh boil. The 17th century saw Parliament and the Crown go to actual war - Charles I was eventually tried and beheaded by his own subjects, which sent shockwaves through every royal court in Europe. After considerable chaos, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought William III of Orange - grandson of William the Silent, and yes, that Orange family - to the English throne. But here's the key: Parliament invited him. The Crown didn't conquer Parliament. Parliament chose the Crown. That distinction changed everything.

John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689 - the year after the Glorious Revolution. Natural rights. Consent of the governed. The right to revolution when government fails its people. If you've ever read the Declaration of Independence, you've read a document deeply shaped by Locke. Thomas Jefferson didn't plagiarize him - but he didn't have to. These ideas were in the air that every educated colonist breathed.

Montesquieu added separation of powers. Rousseau added the social contract. By the mid-1700s, the intellectual ammunition for a revolution was fully loaded. It just needed someone willing to fire it.

What made the American founding remarkable wasn't just the idealism - it was the intentionality. The Founders were students of everything we've talked about. They knew Athens fell. They knew Rome's Republic collapsed. They'd watched the Dutch Republic struggle. They'd read Locke and Montesquieu cover to cover. And they tried - imperfectly, contradictorily, but genuinely - to build something that wouldn't make the same mistakes.

Federalism. Separation of powers. A Bill of Rights. A mechanism for amendment, because they knew they wouldn't get everything right. They were building a machine designed to outlast its builders - and to self-correct when it drifted off course.

Were they hypocrites? Some of them, absolutely. The Declaration said "all men are created equal" and the Constitution counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. The ideal outran the reality by a devastating margin. But here's what the Founders also understood: they were planting something. The ideal was in the soil. Others would water it - Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. King - and standing beside that reflecting pool in 1963, with hundreds of thousands of people bearing witness, was proof that the watering had not been in vain. May we all be judged by the content of our character, and not the color of our skin.

I can't talk about the Age of Revolution without a quick word about France - because it's a warning worth heeding.

The French Revolution began in 1789, inspired in large part by America. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité - beautiful words. The ideals were real. But within a few years, the revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror, mass executions, and eventually the rise of Napoleon - a man who crowned himself Emperor. The contrast with America is striking and not accidental. The French tore down their institutions without building better ones first. When you destroy without constructing, chaos fills the vacuum - and chaos always invites a strongman.

Liberty without structure isn't liberty. It's just a different kind of tyranny wearing a revolutionary hat. Those who would tear down our institutions today without offering a better option run the same risk.

Two hundred and fifty years. A Bear family rooted in Anglo-Saxon Devon, carrying the English tradition of common law and the Magna Carta in their bones. A Somsen family from the Dutch provinces that built the world's first free republic. Both families winding their way to America - to New York, then Indiana (for the Bears at least), and finally to North Dakota where they met and wed, and now my small branch - to Colorado - and a patriotic great-grandson writing a monthly blog in Fort Collins.

When I stood at City Park and watched those fireworks light up the sky on the 4th, I felt it - the weight and the wonder of what this country represents. Not a perfect country. Never has been. But a country built on an idea that has outlasted empires, survived a civil war, absorbed wave after wave of people from everywhere on earth, and - haltingly, imperfectly, stubbornly - kept trying to live up to its own ideals.

The person who took a blade to the Reflecting Pool doesn't understand any of this, I'm afraid. They looked at a mirror designed for reflection and saw something worth breaking. That's what happens when people lose the thread - when they don't know the story of what was sacrificed, over centuries and across continents, so that we could argue about politics over a cold beer on a summer evening in a free country.

Know the story. Protect the monuments. Pursue Liberty - with justice.

And maybe - just maybe - next year, we get to watch the fireworks without a fence around the water mirror.

Happy America 250. Here's to 250 more.

- Curt