The Declaration of Independence

[Maggie]

The Declaration of Independence

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/opinion/30kristol.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, I thought this was an interesting concept. Yes, I do read the New York Times. ;-) While, during this time of year, I have often taken the time to read this document actually reciting the Declaration at your own holiday function might be an interesting way to reflect on the founding of our country. I believe it is much more powerful when read aloud. I suppose I would want to involve everyone – with each person reading a line or two even if it would take a while. Yes, it might be considered corny and some people might inappropriately snicker; however, I think people forget what a wonderful and profound document our Founding Fathers created.

In case I forget over the next few days – Happy Fourth of July everyone.

[Snapshot9]

Interesting idea. Sometimes we have a tendency to think that people that lived in the past were not as intelligent as we are today. Our bill or Rights, Declaration of Independence and Constitution are great documents drawn up by profoundly intelligent men of the times.

[jazztrane]

Doesn't sound corny at all to me, actually a very good idea. Sometimes we need to look back and read things like that from the past to maintain the reason for some of our holidays and not let them become just a day off and a bbq!

[Maggie]

For anyone interested -- here is the text, without the rather long list of offenses committed by the King of Great Britain.


When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds 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.

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 to 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

* * *

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

[SubGod22]

Where are our leaders like that?

[CharlieHog]

Remarks from Colin Powell, US Secretary of State at the World Economic Forum, 2003



QUESTION: Mr. Secretary of State, I'm George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. I'm now happily retired and here at the World Economic Forum. And I thank you very much indeed for your address and for all that you are personally doing to improve the state of the world.

Mr. Secretary of State, at this conference, among the language that has been used has been a phrase, the difference between hard power and soft power: hard power and military power, and perhaps expressed in America as the only superpower with a grave responsibility to create and help to forward the cause of peace in the world; and then soft power, soft power which binds us all, which has something to do with values, human values and all the things that you and I passionately believe in.

Here at WEF, we are thinking of creating a Council of 100 which includes business leaders, politicians, religious leaders -- trying to cross all of the boundaries of media and so on. That may be something that you may wish to give your support to in the days ahead.

But I've got two questions, if I may. The first one: Do you feel that in the present situation, and I'm following on my colleague who just spoke, and regarding Iraq but also Palestine as well, that we are doing enough in drawing upon the common values expressed by soft power in uniting what is called West and the Middle East in Islam and Christianity, in Judaism and other religions?

And would you not agree, as a very significant political figure in the United States, Colin, that America, at the present time, is in danger of relying too much upon the hard power and not enough upon building the trust from which the soft values, which of course all of our family life that actually at the bottom, when the bottom line is reached, is what makes human life valuable?

(Applause.)

SECRETARY POWELL: The United States believes strongly in what you call soft power, the value of democracy, the value of the free economic system, the value of making sure that each citizen is free and free to pursue their own God-given ambitions and to use the talents that they were given by God. And that is what we say to the rest of the world. That is why we participated in establishing a community of democracy within the Western Hemisphere. It's why we participate in all of these great international organizations.

There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in our culture that suggests we want to use hard power. But what we have found over the decades is that unless you do have hard power -- and here I think you're referring to military power -- then sometimes you are faced with situations that you can't deal with.

I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan.

So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.

(Applause.)

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.

[Maggie]

I agree with the remarks of Colin Powell. In fact, I think that his remarks are something a good deal of American's need to remember. Has the United States made mistakes? Of course, no nation is perfect. But, the existence of the United States, in its very short time on this planet, has done far more good than evil.

However, the former Archbishop does make a point relevant today. While I think there are certain members of our current government that are are bright, informed and idealistic, they simply, in my opinion, tend overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence.

Nice post, Charlie.

[Maggie]

Where are our leaders like that?

The fact that I actually gave your question some thought and still do not have an answer – is kind of sad.

Charlie's suggestion is not bad but I doubt we will see Gen. Powell in the political arena in the near future.

[SubGod22]

Where are our leaders like that?

The fact that I actually gave your question some thought and still do not have an answer – is kind of sad.

Charlie's suggestion is not bad but I doubt we will see Gen. Powell in the political arena in the near future.

I first typed that out half joking. Then I thought and had a hard time thinking of people. Yes, I'm sure we can come up with some if we dig. I do think Powell would probably fall under that type of leader, and that's probably why he won't lead this great nation. Too many in politics are too obsessed with power and not with truly doing what is right. Not to say all action and all politicians are in it for nothing but the power and influence, but it seems very few are up for the self sacrifice of this nations greatest leaders.

Sadly, politics is way too politicized these days. I pray someone will step up to lead in the not too distant future. The guy I had faith in to be a good solid leader didn't appeal to the rest of the nation. I have a few I'm hoping will have a shot in 2012 for the Presidency. I'm also hoping that I can find some local/state representatives that I can believe in as well soon.

But that may be getting a little too far off topic here.

[Maggie]

I am not one who subscribes to the idea that politics is to "politicized" or nasty or whatever when compared to the past.

What I have a problem with is the extent to which the news media, print media, pundits, etc. have taken what they consider to be the "politics of personal destruction". Politics has always involved personal attacks which often times were gross exaggerations and even flat out lies – and that still happens today. However, I think that the attention paid to such attacks has to some extent hampered the public discourse.

I guess what I am trying to say is this: Politics is supposed to be an arena where IDEAS are debated. However, when one is critical of a persons ideas or polices it is seen as a personal attack on that person. I think this is in part true because average people, wrongly in my opinion, personalize their own ideas too much. Hence, when one politician is critical of another's idea, votes, policy, etc. it is made out to be personal attack. Trust me when I write this is true as I have much experience being a relatively lonely conservative in NYC.

As a result, politicians, themselves, are loath to be critical, all we get to hear are meaningless 30-second sound bites, and catch phrases about hope, the truth talk express, etc. I want to know what these people think. I want them to take a position and stick to it. If they feel they need to change positions (which is fine) then I want a good explanation – not some vague non-answer that really means their internal polls changed their mind. I want them to have to answer difficult questions and justify their positions. It just doesn't seem to happen in this day and age. I have also grown tired of media pundits essentially telling me what to think, how to vote or obviously favoring one candidate.

I am going stop now because I seem to have hijacked a thread I started.

[engrshock]

I am not one who subscribes to the idea that politics is to "politicized" or nasty or whatever when compared to the past.

What I have a problem with is the extent to which the news media, print media, pundits, etc. have taken what they consider to be the "politics of personal destruction". Politics has always involved personal attacks which often times were gross exaggerations and even flat out lies – and that still happens today. However, I think that the attention paid to such attacks has to some extent hampered the public discourse.

I guess what I am trying to say is this: Politics is supposed to be an arena where IDEAS are debated. However, when one is critical of a persons ideas or polices it is seen as a personal attack on that person. I think this is in part true because average people, wrongly in my opinion, personalize their own ideas too much. Hence, when one politician is critical of another's idea, votes, policy, etc. it is made out to be personal attack. Trust me when I write this is true as I have much experience being a relatively lonely conservative in NYC.

As a result, politicians, themselves, are loath to be critical, all we get to hear are meaningless 30-second sound bites, and catch phrases about hope, the truth talk express, etc. I want to know what these people think. I want them to take a position and stick to it. If they feel they need to change positions (which is fine) then I want a good explanation – not some vague non-answer that really means their internal polls changed their mind. I want them to have to answer difficult questions and justify their positions. It just doesn't seem to happen in this day and age. I have also grown tired of media pundits essentially telling me what to think, how to vote or obviously favoring one candidate.

I am going stop now because I seem to have hijacked a thread I started.

Having just read the biography "John Adams" I am humbled with respect to the strength of belief and character that he and others demonstrated. The book did however demonstrate that there were shenanigans and attacks even then. This led to a break in the friendship between Adams and his close friend Thomas Jefferson that lasted for many years and the reason that Adams was not elected to a 2nd term. Jefferson funded and supported some letter that attacked Adams. Another fact was that both of these gentlemen died on July 4, 1826 and were the last of the signers of the Declaration of Independence alive. The politics and compromises that went into the eventual passing of the Declaration of Independence was truly amazing to read about. While the Virginians (Washington and Jefferson) carried the power of influence (wealth) Adams and others from smaller less wealthy states clearly had a large role just based upon his character. The truly dirty political games occurred in the courts in England and France.

I would recommend this book or at least watching the miniseries based upon the book.

[Maggie]

A few thoughts:

On this Fourth of July — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises.

By almost any barometer, the United States remains the most fortunate country in the world. We continue to be the primary destination of immigrants, who risk their lives to have a chance at what we take for granted. Few in contrast are flocking to China, Russia, or India. The catalyst for immigration is primarily a phenomenon of word of mouth, of comparative talking among friends and families about the reality of modern-day living, not of scholarly perusal of social or economic statistics.

When one compares any yardstick of material wealth — the number of cars, the square footage of living space, the number of consumer appurtenances — Americans are the wealthiest people in the history of civilization. Why so? Others have more iron ore, as much farmland, greater populations, and far more oil reserves. But uniquely in America there still remains a system of merit, under which we prosper or fail to a greater extent on the basis of talent, not tribal affiliations, petty bribes, or institutionalized insider help. More importantly still, we are impressed by those who advance rather than envious of their success. The lobster-barrel mentality is a human trait, but in the United States uniquely there is a culture of emulation rather than of resentment, which explains why neither Marxism nor aristocratic pretension ever became fully entrenched in America.

Our system of government remains the most stable and free. Consider the constitutional crises in Europe where national plebiscites continue to reject the European constitution that grows increasingly anti-democratic in order to force its vision of heaven-on-earth on its citizenry. There is no need to mention the politics of China, India, and Russia whose increasing affluence ensures a rendezvous with unionism, class concerns, suburban blues, minority rights, environmentalism — all long known and dealt with by the United States. Elsewhere the remedy for tribal and sectarian chaos in Africa or the Middle East is usually authoritarianism.

The current challenge of America is not starvation or loss of political rights — we have been far poorer and more unfree in our past, but the complacence that comes with continued success, to such a degree that we think of our bounty as a birthright rather than a rare gift that must be hourly maintained through commitment to the values that made us initially successful: high productivity, risk-taking, transparency, small government, personal freedom, concern for the public welfare, and a certain tragic rather than therapeutic view of the human experience.

In that regard, most of our present pathologies are self-created. In fits of utopianism we felt we could be perfect environmentalists, no longer develop our ample oil, coal, and nuclear resources, maintain our envied lifestyle, mouth platitudes about “alternative energies,” and yet be immune from classical laws of supply and demand. In truth, with a with a little national will, within a decade we could both be using new sources of energy and producing our entire (and decreasing) appetite for oil without importation at all of foreign supplies. Before our petroleum runs out, we WILL find other sources of energy; when a Saudi Arabia’s or Venezuela’s fail, so goes their entire national wealth.

Our budgetary laxity is a bipartisan stand-off in which free-spending pork-bail Republicans mouth platitudes about reductions in spending while Democrats continue to vote for increased government programs, assured that either military cuts or tax increases will pay the tab. We still await some gifted statesman who will convince us that we can increase revenues and cut spending without loss of essential governmental services or oppressive taxes.

Iraq is expensive, but draws on a fraction of a $12 trillion economy; for all the acrimony over the war, Iraq is stabilizing, al-Qaeda has been discredited, and the notion of constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate is not longer caricatured as a neocon pipedream — an accomplishment beyond the military of any other country.

Slumping house prices are a concern, but we forget that nearly 95 percent of homeowners meet their monthly mortgage payments, that housing prices are merely returning to their 2002 levels — to the relief of first-time potential buyers — that many of the problems were caused by housing speculators who wished to flip properties for instant profits, by overzealous lenders who warped the rules, and by misplaced liberalism that sought to put everyone in his own home, despite the historical fact that between 30 percent and 40 percent of the population either should not, or does not wish to, own their homes.

Given the strength of our system and culture and our inherited values and wealth, as long as we don’t tamper with our Constitution, a uniquely American entrepreneurial culture, and the melting-pot notion of shared values rather than balkanized tribes, races, and religions, we can rectify our present mistakes without much reduction in our soaring standard of living. In America alone — for all our periodic hysterical self-recrimination — there is still comparatively little danger of coups, nationalization of foreign assets, crippling national strikes, sectarian violence, terrorism, suppression of free speech, or rampant government and judicial corruption that elsewhere lead to endemic violence and economic stagnation.

On this "troubled" Fourth we still should remember this is not 1776 when New York was in British hands and Americans in retreat across the state. It is not 1814 when the British burned Washington and the entire system of national credit collapsed — or July 4, 1864 when Americans awoke to news that 8,000 Americans had just been killed at Gettysburg.

We are not in 1932 when unemployment was still over 20 percent of the work force, and industrial production was less than half of what it had been just three years earlier, or July, 1942, when tens of thousands of American were dying in convoys and B-17s, and on islands of the Pacific in an existential war against Germany, Japan, and Italy.

Thank God it is not mid-summer 1950, when Seoul was overrun and arriving American troops were overwhelmed by Communist forces as they rushed in to save a crumbling South Korea. We are not in 1968 when the country was torn apart by the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago. And we are not even in the waning days of 1979, a year in which the American embassy was seized in Tehran and hostages taken, the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, thousands were still being murdered in Cambodia, Communism was on the march in Central America, and our president was blaming our near 6-percent unemployment, 8-percent inflation, 15-percent interest rates, and weakening international profile on our own collective “malaise.”

We live in the most prosperous and most free years of a wonderful republic, and can rectify our present crises that are largely of our own making and a result of the stupefying effects of our unprecedented wealth and leisure. Instead of endless recriminations and self-pity — of anger that our past was merely good rather than perfect as we now demand — we need to give thanks this Fourth of July to our ancestors who created our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and suffered miseries beyond our comprehension as they bequeathed to us most of the present wealth, leisure, and freedom we take for granted.

Happy Fourth of July!!

[WstateU]

Excellent!

:good: :good:

[SubGod22]

I'm speechless. Well said Maggie.