Independence Day 2022
Independence Day, 2022
– by New Deal democrat
The opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:
“ 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.”
Lincoln’s acceptance of the Illinois US Senate nomination, 1858:
“We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
“Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ’A house divided against itself cannot stand.’
“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States.”
On this Fourth of July, let us hope that our current crisis will be passed without the fall of democrat government under the rule of law.
[Abraham Lincoln’s burial chamber]
These Truths We Hold—and Share
NY Times – July 4
The heart does not exactly swell with patriotic pride this Independence Day, as the gut absorbs one dizzying, disorienting blow after the next. Our sense of who we are, our very identity as Americans, feels assaulted and violated. Amid profound, painful regression on issue after issue, we are left gasping for breath.
Our nation seems more irreparably divided than ever before in my lifetime, barreling down a parallel path, perhaps, to the one our forebearers traveled in the 1850s.
What we do now matters urgently. And the American identity that we still share matters too, not least because it must inform and inspire a common effort, across our differences, to find our way out and forward. I believe we still can agree on a set of ideas — values and aspirations — enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, 246 years on.
In our founding, I see flawed genius. In the declaration we celebrate, I see a statement of purpose. In our Constitution, I see our founders entrusting each generation to fix what the preceding one was unwilling to repair.
To me, the callous cruelty of our founders — at least 34 of the 56 men who signed the declaration also enslaved human beings — is less remarkable than what they set in motion, however contradictory. They initiated a grand, complicated experiment with self-government that made possible abolition and suffrage, worker’s rights and civil rights and women’s rights, however slowly and unevenly. More astounding still, Black people and brown people, the Indigenous and the immigrant, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people with disabilities, all claimed the American project as our own and expanded the circle of inclusion and opportunity.
Our founders bequeathed to us something radical, something unprecedented: the tools with which to build a multiracial, multiethnic, pluralist democracy that extends the privilege of American identity to all. …
Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation.
Let America Be America Again – Langston Hughes
Orchestras Rethink ‘1812 Overture,’ a July 4 Rite
NY Times – July 4
Not since the Vietnam War have I felt less pride in being an American. Some years ago I was visiting my wife’s brother in New Brunswick and I learned about the history of the Tories fleeing following the British loss of the Revolutionary War. At the time I thought it was a toss up whether they had made the right decision to flee. Now, it appears that they better provided for their descendants than the winners did for theirs.
Country going to shit. Lot’s of hopelessness just about everywhere. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
https://youtu.be/aUx9kZuwrm…
The growth of democracy has been an incremental thing. The British (unwritten) constitution came to include universal suffrage after starting as guaranteeing the rights (power) of the nobility. Here, it began with the rights of white, male, property owners. We are currently in danger of having them incrementally shrunk and eliminated.