Every American should take a short break from the food, fireworks and festivities today to do one important thing: Read the Declaration of Independence.
If you missed the live reading at Fort McHenry over “The Glorious Fourth: An Old-Fashioned Fourth of July Weekend,” pull it off the bookshelf or get it up on the Web and read it today. Read it aloud, with gusto.
Making our first document a central part of any celebration is a great and glorious idea. Reading it at Fort McHenry was both an affirmation of our founding ideals and a reminder that they require eternal struggle, within and without, to be sustained.
Two hundred and thirty years ago when our founders invoked “the Laws of Nature and Nature?s God” to create what eventually would become a more perfect union, they put not only their lives and sacred honor on the line, they rolled the dice of human history into the Third Millennium.
For what they ventured was something never attempted before, or since. They founded a nation upon an idea, that before government all citizens are created equal ? that we are ruled by laws, not men, and rulers cannot act without the express consent of the governed.
Our nation is not founded on accident of geography, or ethnic heritage, or language, or any other thing than that ideal.
When members of our armed forces and civilian authorities, including the President, take an oath, they swear not to a motherland or fatherland, or to some king or emperor, or to a deity or self-proclaimed earthly incarnation of one.
No, they swear to protect and defend our founding idea, incorporated into a governing document 23 years after our Declaration ? the Constitution of the United States of America ? against all enemies foreign and domestic, whether within government or without.
That is our greatest strength. That is what has preserved us through centuries past and will into a distant future. We must remain loyal to our founding idea.
At Fort McHenry, we come to understand that no matter how great an idea, the document embodying it or the government it embodies, our defense must be eternal.
A little more than three decades after the Declaration, our nation was tested by an outside threat, the greatest military power in the world.
At Fort McHenry our young nation prevailed against it. Less than 50 years later, forces from within threatened our founding ideal. Again, our ideals prevailed.
Our ideals have proven stronger than every danger over more than two centuries. Now is the time to renew our faith in them.
Do so today by reading the Declaration of Independence.
For the full text and other information: http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration
