Good morning
and Happy Fourth of July to everyone. I am sure that you have things to do
today – hopefully fun stuff such as cooking out, setting off safe fireworks,
watching parades or chilling by some sort of body of water. So I will make this
short.
Looking
back, I see that I have mentioned Independence Day in various posts, but never
wrote about the history of the holiday. Of course, you all learned that in
school and committed it to memory, right? Ok, maybe not all of it, but I am
sure most remember hearing that Thomas Jefferson, for the most part, wrote the
Declaration of Independence and that the colonies signed it on July 4, 1776.
Well, it went something like that, depending on what you read, but as already
mentioned, I am going to make this short. Here is what I really want you to remember
today.
The preamble
which begins with these famous lines, “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.”
I’d like to
reprint the rest of that preamble here, or a paraphrase of it. I actually found
a version of the Declaration of Independence online in “modern day language”. I’ll
leave it to you to look it up and read it. As with anything that is
paraphrased, there is a certain amount of interpretation, which veers from the
original sentiments, which is why I won’t post it here. (I need to stop writing,
don’t I? So much for keeping this short.)
What I
really want to say is that if you are a citizen of these United States of
America, your government was formed to allow you to have these rights and
freedoms, along with all of your friends, neighbors and enemies. You may not
agree with these people on everything, but you have to agree that they have the
same rights and freedoms as you do. And we need to be respectful of that in what we say and do. That’s all folks.
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