EDITORIAL SPIRIT OF '76 CELEBRATING THE HUNGER FOR FREEDOM - THEN AND NOW.

FOR an American Tory in 1776, living in the colonies with the favor of the king and the British elite, the prospect of some provincial patriots clamoring about independence must have been disconcerting at the very least.

Secede from England?

Surely these colonials had gone mad! How could a struggling new country ever survive without the institutional backing of the empire? How would it assess taxes, wage wars, conduct trade, govern its lands?

For our Tory, a comfortable creature of the corrupt status quo, the mere prospect of independence would have evoked fears of disaster - disaster, no doubt, of biblical proportions.

How spectacularly has history proved our Tory wrong!

On this Independence Day, America celebrates the 226th anniversary of its freedom from the British crown, and the courage of its founders to seek their own course. The nation has survived wars civil, worldly and cold, and now valiantly fights against freedom's newest enemies in the war on terror.

On July 4, 1776, the 13 American colonies set off on a new vision of government, one in which republican democracy would replace inherited rule. Regular elections would precede the peaceful transfer of power. Taxation would not come without representation. Authority would be vested in local governments, not distant and unresponsive overlords.

It was a vision that was revolutionary, both in the figurative and in the literal sense. And while America has, at times, fallen far short of its lofty founding ideals, it has never lost sight of those ideals, either, forever struggling to be more just and democratic, to do away with the next vestige of tyranny or abuse.

Each one of those struggles, like the initial struggle from which the country was born, has been met with opposition. Just as surely as there are those who suffer from injustice, there are also those who profit from it, like our hypothetical Tory in 1776.

Those individuals and institutions will invariably come together to protect their privilege.

``When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,'' they will surely be met with resistance.

Standing in the place of the colonial Tory in Los Angeles today is the the downtown developer, the City Hall consultant, the union boss, the political hack whose very lifestyle depends on a City Hall run exactly as it is now, with billions of taxpayer dollars frittered away for special interests at the expense of neighborhoods.

These are the new loyalists, more concerned with protecting a corrupt order than in taking a step closer to America's founding ideals. It's not that they oppose San Fernando Valley secession, as many honorable people do, it's that they oppose any sincere effort to democratize City Hall, to take power away from a distant and unresponsive bureaucracy and return it to the city's neighborhoods.

Valley residents are, for their part, left feeling something like the inhabitants of 18th-century colonies - exploited and taken for granted, denied a say in their own destiny. They yearn for independence, whether it comes in the form of a new city or a dramatically overhauled old one.

The secessionist impulse is a refusal to accept the sad state of what is over the promise of what could be. It is, at its root, an expression of Americanism, a desire to dispatch petty tyrants in pursuit of a freer society.

That's the spirit we celebrate on this day more than any other.

Happy Fourth of July.