RSVP for Lisa’s barbecue. Check.
Prepare the tabouli and buy the drinks to share. Check.
Buy the personal fireworks, and get out the blankets for
reclining on at the high school as we watch the fireworks display.
Check.
RSVP for Lisa’s barbecue. Check.
Prepare the tabouli and buy the drinks to share. Check.
Buy the personal fireworks, and get out the blankets for reclining on at the high school as we watch the fireworks display. Check.
Get out some copies of the Declaration of Independence. …
We always read aloud the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July. We pass it from hand to hand, each person taking a passage. The children listen intently, all trampoline jumping suspended. At times, one of the guests will stumble over an archaic word or phrase.
Vocabulary and syntax were more complex 226 years ago than what we now hear on the evening news.
We began this tradition 15 years ago. I was reading aloud “Little Town on the Prairie” to the kids for the bazillionth time, when I realized that all the biographical and historical fiction we read mentioned reading the Declaration aloud as an integral, nay, as the essential element of an Independence Day celebration. The tradition seems to have been abandoned about a hundred years ago. It is time to resurrect it.
I wondered, as I thumbed through American Historical Documents, what the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would do with the Declaration today. Could it be read aloud in a public school?
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands 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 …” Censor mention of Nature’s God. ” … entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Make that human kind; we do not want to be sexist. “. … requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men.” … Uh oh. Make that men and women, or, better, men, women, children, and LGBTs. “… are …” Hmmm. Adapted by their environments? Certainly not created. “… equal, and that they are endowed by…” By Nothing and Nobody, hence not endowed at all, but merely in temporary and unexplained possession of “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,” at least after they actually emerge from the birth canal, “… Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We would have to edit out more references to men and mankind and brethren. That slur on the Native peoples, who lived so beautifully and peacefully in tune with their environment, will have to go.
Cut to the final paragraph. “We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the…” Not to the Supreme Judge of the World. To King George, perhaps? “… for the rectitude of our intentions, do in the Name, and by 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;” … “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of…” Of what? If not Divine Providence, who would provide protection for that tiny band of rebels, against the assembled might of the greatest army and navy in the world? “… we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our …” Not sacred; mundane, maybe? “… Honor.”
It makes one wonder. Would we have had a Revolution, would there be an America, if the Founders had not been convinced of the existence of God? Even Thomas Jefferson, by all accounts a Deist, not a fundamentalist, cited God as the giver of Rights, God as the Creator of humankind, God as the endower of equality, God as the One who will judge intentions, God as the One who will protect and provide.
Would any of these men have had the courage to pledge their lives and fortunes, if they had thought that King George, Britannica Rex, was the ultimate power on earth? How many of them would have kept their promises, with no concept of the sacredness of honor? Would they have even had an idea of a right independent of might, of a truth and justice transcending the caprices of kings?
Happy Independence Day.
