More good July 4th stuff

Here's Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:

If Nature and Nature's God intended human beings to be free and equal, then the only legitimate government must be self-government. For if none of us is naturally subordinate or superior to anyone else, no one has the right to rule us without first obtaining our approval. Political power, Locke had written, stems only from compact and agreement, and the mutual consent of those who make up the community.

The Declaration of Independence emphasized the point. Not only are all persons endowed by nature with the unalienable rights of equality and freedom, it avowed, but “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

And from the Dreyfuss Initiative website:

We start with no apologies, devoted to the country that declared war on the curse that the world thought eternal:

“You and yours will never rise. You are a serf, you will always be serfs and our heel will always be on your neck.”

Until America said, "Wait a minute. If you can get here, if you are strong and lucky willing to work and can take what life throws at you, you might rise.”

That is the most important political message in the history of civilization. The whole world heard it. That is why they came here, why they come here and why they will always come here.

And Richard Dreyfuss, himself, on our shared cultural mythology:

...that somewhere in their family someone fled oppression in the form of caste and class designed by wealth... to America that was announcing a declaration of war on that situation. The only people in the world that have not yet heard about this literal political miracle is our own kids because we don't teach it (to them).

Help spread the word.