My wife and I drive a hybrid as our declaration of independence from oil. The car’s navigational system quickly earned approval, but last Saturday we declared independence from its despotism.
    Our experience was amusing, yet I could relate it to our Declaration of Independence. Navigational systems and governments serve us, but what if we have to redirect them?     
    Karen mastered our navigational system. She is hardwired to program computers and read instruction manuals. She entered the new Bellingham address of our son and daughter-in-law where we had to deliver our granddaughters.  
    The system calculated a route on a map beginning with our car’s location at home. A woman’s voice declared: “Proceed to the verified route and follow directions.” Karen named the voice Hannah.
    She earned our approval with block-by-block instructions to our son’s driveway.  
    Hannah’s dictatorial control freed Karen from her anxiety driving to new places. She is cross-wired for directions, if she should go left, she goes right.
    To use Jefferson’s words, Hannah endowed her driving “with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
    At first our colonists benefited from England’s direction and governance.
    Our problems began when we compared Hannah’s directions against a known route to our youngest daughter’s address in Portland. Just as Hannah told Karen which way to turn, our oldest called my cell phone. Karen wanted me to hang up so she could hear Hannah’s directions. I explained we were at a stop sign where we had turned left dozens of times.
Karen’s anxiety surfaced, “Yes, but we wandered around once.”
    I responded, “But not at this stop sign.”
    Karen was already dependent on Hannah instead of her experience. Did I have to hang up on our children whenever Hannah spoke?
    Hannah’s approval ratings plummeted. She told us to make illegal u-turns when we avoided congestion. She told us to turn right at the next corner if we left the expressway for gas. She did not know about the cutoff from I-5 northbound to I-90 eastbound. And Hannah cannot remember a shortcut.
    Jefferson’s words warn of creeping despotism: “experience hath shewn that [people] are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
    We learned to silence Hannah or direct her to calculate another route.
I am spoofing our experience, but our founders’ experience with despotism was insufferable. They declared the right to “throw off such government” with a document that laid the foundation for not only our Republic’s constitution, but also worldwide movements for democracy.
On this Fourth that constitution still allows us to throw off leaders with low approval ratings. Without both documents, who knows what direction this country would have taken?
Maybe Hannah knows.