Today marks the 242nd birthday of the United States. We’re certainly looking forward to the parades, ballgames, barbecues and other celebrations of our peculiar experiment in self-governance.

We’re also looking forward to the fireworks displays, albeit with some trepidation. After a low-precipitation winter, vast swaths of our state are bone dry and fire conditions are extremely high. It may be best to enjoy one of the numerous, professional fireworks displays around the Wasatch Front. If you do choose to light off some pyrotechnics, please use common sense, follow local and state ordinances, take precautions and be safe.

Put another way, the only fire we really want to see is the Stadium of Fire.

As our celebrations focus on freedoms and family, we also look back at the events that led to the foundation of our Republic. We ask everyone to recommit to the ideals that Signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Framers of the Constitution fought to establish.

While we currently debate “civility” in public spaces, it’s important to remember that our ancestors asserted their rights and stood up to tyranny when it became necessary. The Boston Tea Party was hardly a genteel gathering. The Founding Fathers thought England and its practices, such as taxation without representation, were wrong and backed it up with the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War.

When it came time for our ancestors to establish a government, there was a false start but the Framers eventually drafted the constitution that would become the cornerstone of our nation. At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin if that nation was to be a republic or monarchy.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin replied.

Thankfully, past Americans have been able to live up to that implied challenge and kept the republic despite countless difficulties.

Still, that challenge and obligation has not gone away. We need to exercise our freedoms if we are to keep them. That includes exercising our First Amendment rights to free speech and exercise of religion. A free press is vital to an informed citizenry and a monitor on government power.

It’s also important to exercise the right to vote to ensure that our republic remains a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

We salute those that have worked tirelessly for freedom, including the six people honored at Saturday’s Freedom Awards Gala in Provo.

Some of the award recipients fought for their personal freedom, including Jake and Vivian Kim, who fled the brutal North Korean regime; and Joshua and Thamara Holt, who were imprisoned by an increasingly despotic government in Venezuela.

Two men — Ret. Lt. Col. H. Grant Keeler and Bun Yom — put their lives on the line so that others could be free. Keeler, who just turned 100, served in World War II and the Vietnam War. Yom faced genocide and imprisonment in Cambodia before being freed and joining his liberators to help rescue thousands of others.

For more than two centuries, we’ve kept the republic set forth by the Framers. It’s vitally important that we work to keep the republic and the ideals it embodies for another 200 years.