For weeks, my family had been building a float for our hometown’s Independence Day parade.

It wasn’t just another parade entry. Our float celebrated the work of our family foundation—The Front Porch of Loudoun: Celebrating the Values that Built America. There was something especially fitting about unveiling it during America’s 250th anniversary in Leesburg, a town named for Thomas Lee, where members of the Lee family once lived, where George Washington was welcomed before the Revolution, and where the Marquis de Lafayette returned fifty years later to a grateful nation.

Then, just after noon on the day before the parade, the announcement came. The parade was canceled because of the extreme heat. Not postponed. Not moved to an earlier hour. Not rescheduled for another day. Simply canceled.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed. Hundreds of families, civic organizations, churches, businesses, and volunteers had spent weeks preparing—work that now would never roll down the street.

But once that first disappointment faded, I realized that what troubled me wasn’t the parade itself. It was the question behind it.

Who decides?

To be clear, I understand the town’s concerns. Heat can be dangerous, and public officials carry responsibilities that private citizens do not. They must weigh emergency response, medical resources, liability, and public safety. Those are legitimate duties. Yet in a free society another responsibility has always rested with citizens themselves: deciding what risks they are willing to accept.

If my family had concluded it was simply too hot to take part, we could have stayed home. If parents believed it unsafe to bring their children, they could have made that call. If older residents felt the weather posed too great a risk, no one would have expected them to attend. Every one of those would have been a reasonable choice. But they would have been our choices.

What struck me most came afterward. Reading through comments online, I found a mother thanking the town for canceling—because now she could tell her daughter that the town had called it off, rather than explain that she had decided the family wasn’t going.

I don’t fault her. Parenting often means disappointing children for good reasons. But something deeper lingered. When did we grow so comfortable letting someone else make the decisions we once considered our own?

That question sent my mind where it often goes these days—to history.

Only a few weeks ago, my husband and I hosted a lecture at Selma by a historian from Gunston Hall on George Mason and the ideas that shaped the American Revolution. Living in a home built by Mason’s grandnephew, and writing novels centered on Mason’s grandson, has a way of keeping those conversations alive long after the audience has gone home.

The generation that declared independence understood danger. Washington’s army fought through brutal winters, disease, hunger, and impossible odds. At the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, soldiers endured temperatures near one hundred degrees in wool uniforms, carrying muskets under enemy fire. The point, of course, isn’t that anyone should march through dangerous heat. It’s whether government should make that decision for everyone.

Mason believed that rights belong to the people first, and that government exists to secure those rights—not to grant them. The Virginia Declaration of Rights opens with a simple but profound idea: that all people are “by nature equally free and independent.” Freedom, in Mason’s world, assumed something we sometimes overlook today.

Responsibility.

Perhaps no one described the tension more thoughtfully than Alexis de Tocqueville. Traveling through America in the 1830s, he marveled at our spirit of self-government—yet he also left a warning that reads as almost prophetic two centuries later. He feared that Americans might one day trade the hard work of governing themselves for the comfort of being governed.

He imagined a power that would rule not by force but by protection—one that would gradually take on more and more of life’s decisions until citizens, relieved of the burden, simply accepted its guidance. It would, he wrote, cover society with “a network of small complicated rules,” gently directing people’s lives, not as a tyrant, but as a caretaker.

Tocqueville wasn’t describing dictatorship. He was describing paternalism—a government that asks less often, “What are citizens free to decide?” and more often, “What decisions should we make for them?” That thought lingered long after I set down the parade announcement.

None of this rests on a single canceled parade. Reasonable people can disagree with the town’s decision. Some will think officials acted wisely; others will think they overreached. But that may not be the conversation that matters most.

As we mark America’s 250th birthday, perhaps the more enduring question is this:
Have we slowly grown more comfortable letting others exercise judgment that once belonged to us?

Freedom has never meant the absence of danger. It has always meant the presence of responsibility. Our founders expected citizens to weigh risks, make hard decisions, accept the consequences, and govern themselves before asking government to do it for them.

That may be the real question behind a canceled parade. Not whether it was too hot to march. But whether, after 250 years, we still trust free people to decide for themselves.

Let me know what you think...