The Enduring Relevance Declaration of Independence On America's 250th [Essay]

The Declaration of Independence was written by a group of rich, white, slave-owners who had no intention of living up to the full ideals of their founding document. It was a document written without women in mind, a document written by men fully prepared to ignore the parts of it they didn't like for their own personal gain.

Yet there are parts of it, 250 years later, which ring depressingly accurate to the current American Political situation. It may indeed be true, as Oscar Wilde said, that Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. It for sure is indeed true, that the American envisioned in these words has never been realized.

Undoubtably though, we are ruled by a tyrant who wishes he were as much a King as George the Third. The accusations that were levied against the British Crown on July 4th, 1776, ring painfully true on July 4th, 2026. The declaration is not a long document, but I've selected below some excerpts that evoke  specifically the American political struggle of our current moment. 

I do not ask that we honor the men who wrote this document, or that we celebrate the two-hundred year history of a nation tarred with injustice and founded on a colonialist annihilation of an indigenous people (something briefly advocated for elsewhere in this document). 

Yet it is important to remember that this was a nation founded on the ideals of democracy and self-rule, on a system of laws instead of absolute executive power, and that these are things every person in this country is entitled to today. To surrender these things to a racist, fascist man who wraps himself in the same flag carried by the Massachusetts 54th at Fort Wagner and the 1st Infantry at Utah Beach would be a shame indeed. 

We can be better, we should be better, and today, I'm going to let these words serve as an inspiration to me. 

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 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 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, 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."

-He has obstructed the Administration of Justice,

-He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people

-For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

-For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

-For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

-For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

-For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

-For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

-For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."