1: For anyone having trouble celebrating today in view of the halting, confusing, depressing state of progress in our country — keep in mind there’s a reason this is not called “America Day” but “Independence Day”.
2: Today we do not celebrate America as it exists now, nor as it’s ever existed. We celebrate the Declaration of Independence and those ideals it declared to the world and the future.
3: The values we celebrate today are the self-evident truths that “all men are created equal”, and the rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are unalienable.
4: Not the pursuit of wealth, nor the pursuit of power, or the pursuit of control, but the pursuit of happiness — personal happiness taking no pre-determined form. And the life and liberty that allows this.
5: That the source of governing power is not wealth, nor physical strength, nor bloodline, nor even God, but the consent of the governed. That no individual is the source of power, but merely borrows that authority from the people until the day they take it back.
6: And I know this is when so many of you will come in with the historical facts that make a mockery of these truths. But I’m not saying that because these things are true, America always or even ever recognized them as such.
7: The problem with declaring such unequivocal, beautiful truths, is that it’s almost impossible for the next thing you say not to carry some measure of hypocrisy. Often, an enormous measure. In America’s case, a nearly fatal measure.
8: So on Independence Day, we do not celebrate America’s adhering to these truths, because we usually haven’t. We have been, to say the least, imperfect followers of them in our slow, compromised, frustrating slog to the dream of a more perfect union.
9: But we celebrate the vision of the imperfect, compromised, flawed people who made this the mission statement and guiding dream of their new country. We celebrate the ability for men who did not understand or acknowledge the truths they declared to still declare those truths.
10: We celebrate that no matter how twisted or corrupted the institutions meant to protect and advance these ideals may become, the ideals themselves can never become twisted because of their simplicity, their purity, their pre-eminence in our history. And their truth.
11: Today, we celebrate the ideal of America that is the challenge for every generation of Americans. A challenge no generation has fully met. A challenge perhaps no generation will ever fully meet.
12: Today we celebrate the resolve that has kept America stumbling forward, even with its occasional fall. And we steel ourselves for the strength it will take to push on to the next step.
13: Guided, as always, by the truths that should never be brooked by qualification — “that all men are created equal” and endowed with those rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Those words are what we celebrate today.
