God Bless America
Today is the 4th of July. It is the anniversary of the day that the United States of America declared its Independence. The people who drafted the formal Declaration of Independence had absolutely no clue what the United States would do or become. It was irrelevant. The entire purpose was to create a body of governments and lands that worked together with the people to give them the choice of how their world would be shaped and how they could shape the world.
The first bits of the text (the full text is available here)of this brilliantly crafted (though using datable language) is as follows :
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,[71] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Others have cited this and the following document or repeated their wording (the French constitution uses BOTH documents as referent.)
What follows is the text of another document… written in response to the most important July 4th in U.S. History. Perhaps the most important date in U.S. History two times.. was the 4th of July. December 7th, 1941 was a date that has lived in infamy.. but July 4th has decided not just the fate of our nation, but the fate of all nations of the Earth. It was twice the date when people stood up, offered their lives and livelihoods to state that “all men are created equal.”
July 4th, 1776 was the date on which the United States declared independence from tyranny and oppression. July 4th, 1863 marked the resolution of the high water mark of another struggle, more costly in terms of morale, humanity, property, and suffering than any in the history of the United States. One in which the United states was faced with the most confounding, and ironic, moral and political dilemma it ever faced… before or since. This was the American Civil War. A misnomer because the Americas have seen many civil wars, but this one marked the beginning of “total war” in which every person, man, woman, and child was deprived and forced to participate in a complete struggle for survival… a pattern that continues to this day… But to its credit, and in this case, the United States prevailed, and became a strong, and though sometimes flawed and misguided, powerful beacon of hope and potential for the world.
I am not the same caliber of orator or speech-writer as he who wrote and gave the following, so I will let his words speak for themselves. :
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Despite the fact that our current government and many of those before it have abused the rights, privileges, heritage, and spirit of these two works, they have stood the test of time. On this 4th of July let us remember that it is the unalienable right of every person to be free and let us pray that governments of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
God Bless America
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