The Fourth of July

Two hundred and thirty-six years ago today, a rag tag, motley group of colonies formally and elegantly told the mightiest empire at the time to go stuff themselves. Although it seems like ancient history, the American colonies’ challenge of the doctrine of divine right was nothing short of revolutionary. The newly formed United States chose to cast off a monarch and install a republic, a form of government that had laid dormant for two thousand years.

Primarily written by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence famously states:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are empowered by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

According to the good folks at wikipedia, this has been called “one of the best-known sentences in the English language”, containing “the most potent and consequential words in American history.” Well, if my source is wikipedia, then it must be true. Even if my source is not the best, I have always found the Declaration to be nothing short of inspirational.

There is a bit of a downside to claiming the moral high road in such a well read document. About a decade later, the United States abandoned the Articles of Confederation and formally adopted the current Constitution of the United States. Embarrassingly enough, forever enshrined in the Constitution, is language that expressly condones slavery. Indeed, the lofty ideals set forth in the Declaration contains a fair bit of hypocrisy. Apparently the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness only applied to white dudes.

And so the American experiment began. America opened her doors to immigration and pursued the shocking and bizarre policy of Manifest Destiny (Google it) expanding from the Eastern seaboard to the West coast. Entire cities sprang forth out of nothing. Today, the United States is the largest economy in the world and the third largest country by population.

Even though America was admittedly founded in hypocrisy, that is not the America I was born into or love. As a second generation American, I am keenly aware of the fact that my ancestors were kicked out of every decent nation in Europe. My ancestors arrived several decades after the CIvil War, the abolition of slavery, and the women’s suffrage movement. Yet things were still far from perfect. The Jim Crow laws allowing for segregation remained on the books for roughly a century after the end of slavery. However, my grandfather never faced violence, discrimination, or persecution again after moving to the New World.

As much as Americans love America, I realize that this feeling is not universally held. We have backed the wrong warlords with American weaponry, we have fought wars we had no right fighting, we tend to view our country as the center of the universe, we have a wide disparity between our richest citizens and our poorest, and we are the only OECD country that does not have healthcare for all of its citizens. However, today is not about our shortcomings, it is about celebrating a nation of dreamers who dared to challenge the status quo, who, after two hundred years, is finally starting to live up to the ideals that were written in the Declaration of Independence. Happy birthday, USA!