Monday, July 04, 2022
American Independence Day, the Disruptive Holiday!
Greetings, dear readers! It's our annual July 4 post. Two hundred forty six years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was released, ending America's status as a set of English colonies and starting the American nation. This disrupted the British colonial system, and even more, disrupted the world by introducing a fundamentally new idea: states are means to an end, not ends in themselves. The Declaration remains the greatest political document ever written. Today the Daily Caller published a short essay by your faithful Chief Blogger and CEO of Unforeseen Contingencies on why everyone everywhere should celebrate American Independence Day and the Declaration.
Two hundred forty six years later, many of us are dedicated to the principles on which it rests: the inherent and unalienable natural rights of the individual, the status of government as a mere servant and means to the end of protecting those rights, and peaceful relations among all who agree to respect and live by those rights. These are universal principles, applying to all human beings. And they are the basis of civilization, finally made explicit.
Oddly, there are those today who knowingly reject these principles and oppose liberty...viscerally hate liberty is often accurate. There's something wrong with them. If one does not accept unalienable, inviolable individual rights, then what is left? As President Calvin Coolidge noted,
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
One of the interesting things about the Declaration is what was in Jefferson's first draft. Jefferson included a condemnation of slavery.
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of INFIDEL Powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.
