Text 20961, 70 rader
Skriven 2006-07-05 20:20:16 av EARL CROASMUN (1:275/311)
     Kommentar till en text av Sean Dennis
Ärende: A thought for the 4th
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Another example, borrowed from Andrew Sullivan:

""All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general
spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the
palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles
on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them
legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others.
For ourselves, let the annual return of this day [Independence Day]
forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished
devotion to them," - Thomas Jefferson, June 24, 1826"

Also, somewhat longer, but appropriate since there are Republicans who
will base their 2006 campaigns upon attacks on immigrants as well as
their attacks on gays and pregnant women:

"Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about
the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings
I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I
suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty---or about thirty millions of
people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land
of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for
about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small
people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a
vastly less extent of country,---with vastly less of everything we deem
desirable among men,---we look upon the change as exceedingly
advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that
happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this
rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we
claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought
for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that
by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that
we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind
ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was
done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and
we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves---we feel more
attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we
inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and
country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done
all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else
connected with it. We have besides these men---descended by blood from
our ancestors---among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants
at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe---German,
Irish, French and Scandinavian---men that have come from Europe
themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here,
finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through
this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they
find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that
glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but
when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find
that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral
sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that
it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a
right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of
the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That
is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of
patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those
patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of
men throughout the world. "  Abraham Lincoln, July 10, 1858.







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