Saorsa!

As the Unit­ed States cel­e­brates 238 years of inde­pen­dence from Britain, Scot­land is approach­ing the impor­tant deci­sion whether to no longer be a part of the Unit­ed King­dom. On the 18^th of Sep­tem­ber, Scots will go to the polls to vote on a ref­er­en­dum on inde­pen­dence.

I can­not pre­tend to have enough knowl­edge of pol­i­tics in Scot­land to know whether becom­ing a neigh­bor to rather than a mem­ber of the Unit­ed King­dom is good for Scot­land or good for Britain, or any of that. But this is, after all, the point. I don’t know what’s best for Scot­land bet­ter than the Scots do. I can’t and nei­ther can any­one else. A free peo­ple must rule them­selves or have the pow­er to choose their own lead­ers. In the end, these amount to the same thing.

How­ev­er the ref­er­en­dum goes on Sep­tem­ber the eigh­teenth, as an Amer­i­can and a descen­dent of men who took up arms against the British over two cen­turies ago, I salute you in Scot­land for tak­ing up the bal­lot rather than the rifle. I hope that it brings you the kind of hap­py rela­tion­ship the Unit­ed States enjoys with Great Britain today. Real allies must stand togeth­er on their own ground. Even should you decide to remain a part of the Unit­ed King­dom, you will have made that choice delib­er­ate­ly and through a trans­par­ent demo­c­ra­t­ic mechanism.