I follow a historian, Heather Cox Richardson. She posted this tonight, and I agree.
[quote]And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually to include women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “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.”
Racists, religious nuts, and conservatives are a dying breed. It will eventually turn around in the end. Someday we will flip Florida and Texas and then the dark times will be over. Both these states have large growing urban areas surrounded by fading rural areas. It is inevitable.
Of course then we still need to get 60 votes in the Senate to end the filibuster forever, too.
For sure. There are aspects of my country (and my ancestors) about which I feel immense shame. And yet this place where I've lived most of my life is a place of sustenance, safety, mostly peaceful, and full of natural beauty.
It's the flaws in democratic processes that bother me - and yet I still consider it the best of all the systems of government. It means that if enough people don't like what the govt does, we can change without resorting to civil war with all the destruction, pain and grief that comes with it.
Right. It is not all difficult to grasp, and those who refer to those who simply criticize actions of or something that is going in their country as not "real" Americans or "traitors" and such?
Those who do that disgust me, especially when they do it based simply on opposing political views and affiliation.
@Piper Thank you. I get really tired of the folks whose go-to is "U.S. love it or leave it" and wonder if that’s always their attitude in every instance.
I do too, @bijouxbroussard. Maybe it sickens and angers me more than I should let it, because my father served honorably in the US military for 23 years, and my brother for 5. There are those who would and have denigrated their service to this country, simply because they were registered [b]Democrats[/b].
I wonder about that too, and have noticed that it [i]is[/i] often their attitude in most every instance. Except when [b]they[/b] are outraged about something going on in their country, of course. [b]Then[/b] it's "patriotic".
American are taught to be outrageously proud and when they are asked why they believe their country is better than others either they don't know or they are grossly misinformed.
Blind patriotism. If you look at the current stats there is nothing to be proud of.
