EDITORIAL: Celebrate the perpetual goal of independence

Today we celebrate the Declaration of Independence — a radical, extraordinary, bold and unprecedented statement of freedom that consistently defines and improves our country.

The founders valued the individual, and the freedom to live free of excessive influence, authority and control aside from the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The authors expressed the “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.”

The statement regards authorities, aside from a person’s God, as mere servants of “Man” — which today we define as humankind.

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” the Declaration implores.

When a government no longer serves the people, explains the document, the people may choose to capitulate.

“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,” the Declaration explains.

Yet, suffering has limits and the founders suggested a remedy when the pain becomes too much. If freedom ceases to reign, the people must take charge.

“…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,” the Declaration tells us.

When our founders signed this statement, it symbolized hypocrisy. We were free from King George III but had nothing resembling the independence — and the derivative liberty — espoused by the document and enjoyed today. The Declaration was, and remains, an aspirational statement with no legal authority. Yet, it works. We have seen the people “right themselves” for the subsequent 248 years.

In the early days of this country — far from the Declaration’s ideals — Blacks suffered the hell and imprisonment of slavery, at the hands of property owners. Men were “created equal,” but governments protected the ancient practice of entitled men controlling others against their will.

This failed to comport with “created equal,” because authorities believed some men were created for others to control. Such absolute despotism led Americans to fight and die in a successful effort to throw off a tyrannical government and right themselves.

Since then, we’ve had no bloody civil wars. Instead, we have risen against foreign tyrants to protect our independence and all it stands for. Domestically, we have used peaceful process and dialogue — manifestations of our inalienable rights — to expand liberty for all and entrust new guards of our security.

Because of the Declaration, we resist taxation without representation. We insist on integrated schools and other forms of academic freedom and educational choice. We trust the accused and ensure them due process. We defend the free exchange of goods, services, values and ideas. At our best, we live and let live.

In their independence, Americans promote ever-expanding rights for demographics the founders did not contemplate. We have places of worship throughout the country representing countless forms of organized belief. We have 50 sovereign states with independent laws for dramatically different cultural mores.

Because of the Declaration, we have become known as history’s most diverse, productive, intellectual, advanced and prosperous civilization. The Declaration, and all that it manifests, has people of all backgrounds around the globe enjoying the fruits of American exceptionalism.

Few Americans contemplate the Declaration, even on this popular holiday. They don’t need to.

We honor the fruits of our independence, and what it means, with parades, festivals, cookouts and fireworks on “The Fourth of July.”

Because of independence, we enjoy countless transactions that fairly distribute the benefits of love, peace, prosperity, progress and all else that expands liberty in the course of human events.