This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Amanda Vuke, Research Intern for the John Locke Foundation and Intern for Carolina Journal.

RALEIGH — Tradition.

It is everywhere. We may not live in Anatevka (think Fiddler on the Roof), but tradition still impacts us daily.

We have little traditions that few people know about, like the routine we follow every morning or the way we manage our frustration when that person took our parking space again.

Then there are the traditions that affect other people and are shared with them, like the food everyone always brings to a family reunion, or that movie you watch every time you visit your grandparents.

Some traditions happen only in particular places, like the meal you always buy from a particular restaurant, or what you do in your favorite town. Most traditions follow us around, though, and we pass them on.

We may not realize it, but we impart our traditions to others around us, especially our children. This is natural, and most of us transmit and participate in tradition without thinking about it.

Tradition, however, is more than just what we do. Tradition also encompasses a tradition of ideas. What is conservatism — and my definition is broad enough to include libertarians — all about anyway? Tradition.

Conservatives are for passing the traditions of life, liberty, private property, and justice on to the next generation. This passing down of the tradition is commonly called “teaching children about their heritage,” and that certainly is an appropriate way to describe what is happening, if you only want to scratch the surface.

“Teaching about heritage” implies something in the distant past, something that may have no immediate bearing on the person, something that, like those who lived that heritage, is now dead.

Tradition is active. It is something that was engaged in the past, is being engaged by you in the present, and hopefully will continue to be engaged in the future by those coming behind you. If the ideas upon which America was founded are to remain with us, we must engage them actively. It will not do to idly sit by and expect the ideas embodied in our tradition to generate the life necessary to keep them alive. That is our job as receivers of this tradition.

Tradition is not just active; we receive it. The American traditions of life, liberty, property, and justice are not ideas that we came up with on our own. They were given to us by our ancestors, or given to our immigrant ancestors by the nation itself when they became citizens and chose to call America home.

Tradition, I heard it once said, is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. It seems that many people take the unthoughtful, “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude and claim they are participating in tradition. This seems to fit the definition of traditionalism better than it does tradition. Traditions should be thoughtful decisions. There are many reasons to pass a tradition on or to continue a tradition yourself. The reason for carrying on a tradition could be as simple as it’s a fun thing to do, or it is a way to relive pleasant past memories.

Or, as with America, because freedom and liberty are precious, and we want to protect life, liberty, property, and justice. Because we understand what our fathers and their fathers before them understood — that everyone should be able to have and enjoy these rights. Because we understand that if we do not pass down this tradition to willing recipients, this American dream will succumb to ideology, and our identity as a nation will no longer be the nation founded by our fathers.

So go. Celebrate this tradition; pass it on to those you meet. But make sure in the meantime that you understand why we should continue this tradition. May we keep the cup of the living faith of our ancestors full, and not let our tradition retire to the grave of traditionalism.