The Stone Games

We are within a week of the Scottish Highland Games at Stone Mountain.  If any of you come out, I will be there.

Why might you come, if you are not descended from Scots yourself?  Because you are an American, I might say; and as an American you believe in the Declaration of Arbroath, even if you don't know it by name.

To [King Robert the Bruce], as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. 

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. 

It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

That's 1320.  It's not the Enlightenment, it's not John Locke, it's not the Renaissance and it's not the Reformation.  It's an army of medieval fighting men making clear to the Pope that they would accept no kingship but under the condition that it protected their rights and freedom.  In this they spoke with the same voice as the knights and barons at Runnymede in 1215.

These are your real ancestors.  If you feel moved to to drink a dram in their honor, come to the Stone and follow the call of the pipes.