Pbenjay's Blog

The Declaration of Independence

Did you enjoy the parade?  Did you go to the beach, have a cook-out? Watch the fireworks?  But have you taken a moment to really consider what we were celebrating this weekend? 

We’re celebrating the start of something very special and unique;  the birth of a country based on the idea of liberty.

Photo by Matt (or maybe Stacey) Weinstein

While watching the Fourth of July parade this past Saturday, a young woman came through the crowd of onlookers and asked if we would like a copy of the Constitution of the United States.  Yes we said and she handed us a small pamphlet and a piece of paper.  It was my intention to copy the statements on the piece of paper as a segué to some excerpts from our Constitution.  As I started to write it out, I sensed a certain political slant to the wording.  It was subtle,but not so subtle that I missed just where the philosophy was heading.  Right down the road of state’s rights and opposed to a centralized government.

It’s my blog and I can espouse any political position I wish;  however, this weekend, this day, I choose not to promote my political beliefs as the best for the country or use my blog as a platform to proselytize my point of view and therefore I’m not going to copy those statements into this post because they’re the beliefs of another person.  I just want you to think about what we were celebrating and to perhaps familiarize yourself with the very documents upon which this country was founded.

Selected Quotations

“(The adoption of the Constitution) will demonstrate as visibly the finger of Providence as any possible event in the course of human affairs can ever designate it”. —-George Washington

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.  As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters”.—-Benjamin Franklin

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” —-Thomas Jefferson

“A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” —James Madison

Preamble to The Constitution

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  And that’s just the beginning of this remarkable document.  Look it up online and educate yourself.

And then there’s the Declaration of Independence…

” 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 theem to opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”.