Here is a description of what we are all to be celebrating today. Written with an 'updated usage'style, by our local newspaper editor. Describing the Declaration of Independence.

Much of the document is … well … an apology. “We’re sorry to have to do this,” the Declaration says (although not in so many words), “but the king’s a jerk.” Roughly half of the Declaration is nothing more than a list of the offenses blamed on King George III.

The Declaration says “we tried other means of redress, but no one paid attention.” It says “no offense” to the English people. It tells the rest of the world, “We’ve thought this out; we’re not a bunch of whacked-out radicals.”

But there, interspersed among the “don’t take us wrongs,” are a few sentences in which Thomas Jefferson sketched out what, in 1776, was a pretty whacked-out radical view of government. Read this:

“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. 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.”

Consent of the governed?

We adopted the concept of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that was an idea that was way out there, way back then.

But since, much of the rest of the world has come to regard that vision as the model, because it works. The United States’ system has survived largely unchanged for longer than any major nation existing today.

Perhaps with time, someone will come up with a WHACKED-OUT radical idea that’s better, but we don’t see it happening. The founding fathers embraced democracy, and with the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, came up with a system to translate the ideal into a functioning form of government.

He invokes the Declarations closure by saying “Let us pledge our sacred honor to a system that thinks first about the governed, and second about those who govern us.”

Here is the link to the Declaration…which he does remind at the beginning is very full of all the bad things the English Kings had been doing to the colonies…. but just for ‘safekeeping’ here it is.

www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

HAPPY FOURTH… HAPPY Whacked-Out America.