Independence Day

[rivendellrose]

Cat continues his 4:30am wakeup calls, which tends to make me less likely to get up when my alarm actually goes off a few hours later. For tomorrow, I plan to just get up when he starts harassing me.

Happy Independence Day to everyone out there who's celebrating!

Two important things about this day - first off, even though I disagree with a lot of what our country is doing and standing for, I disagree largely because we are not following the words of our founders. This day was about freedom, not for the majority or even the loud minority, but for everybody - that was the stated intention. We've always fallen short of that in one way or another, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the intention of the document any more than it means we should ignore the failings of its history. We've slipped, we've progressed, we've suffered backlashes and setbacks, but I still think that most of the ideals on which the US was founded were good ones.

As ellid pointed out, we should all consider reading those words that we're celebrating, today. <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/07/04/the_declaration_of_independence/>The Declaration of Independence, as posted by the Boston Globe.</a> Try to spend today embracing that ideal of freedom in your own life, as well as remembering all the sacrifices and mistakes we've made along the way. Freedom is a process, and it's one that takes constant work, consideration, and conscious effort. But I think it's more than worth the work.

Comments

[becksbooks.livejournal.com]

I was watching an interesting thing on PBS last night about how the intention of the Decl. of Independence was changed by later generations - the main part is just a list of "why we hate the king", but the part that we focus on NOW is the pre-amble, which is less than a quarter of the actual document, and wasn't really focused on until the Civil War.

That said, I think that what was said in the preamble is very powerful and we SHOULD remember it, because even if that wasn't the founding fathers' intention, it was a stated principle of the new nation, and one that we still need to work towards.