Reflections on the Declaration of Independence

From Renee: I felt that this comment from Charlie in the comments deserved to be front-paged, so I decided to "make it so". But don't forget to check out the posts below. Wish Corinne a happy (now belated) birthday here, and talk about your favorite Howard Dean speeches/quotes here. Here are links to crossposts of yesterday's "America, time to be born again?" post. You might enjoy checking out the responses, and if you haven't recommended them yet, you might be able to keep one of them from dropping out of sight. My Left Wing, Street Prophets, Booman Tribune, and Daily Kos. And, if you missed Oscar's Word for the Week, it can be found here, and his Saturday Comics can be found here.

The photo of Charlie seen above is from his presentation at last year's DemocracyFest.

I think today would be a great day to begin reflection upon the Declaration of Independence and the principles it seeks to articulate to the world.

Tomorrow may be the official day - but these past few days mark the real struggle of adapting Jefferson's incredible prose to what a majority (more than that - a near consensus) would accept.

It truly was a profound event. But even still - that struggle has lessons within it.

Jefferson, a slave-owning aristocratic-born son of Virginia, wrote far more in the original draft than appears there today.

What might have been the case had his original ideas been adopted intact? What if Franklin and Adams had not convinced Jefferson to "compromise" to get it passed.

What if the slavery question were not removed from the Declaration at the CONCEPTION of this nation. Perhaps our birth - with the Constitution - would not have proved to lead to such a painful adolescence.

Perhaps they were correct - the more "practical" approach WAS necessary - they needed to compromise those principles, at that moment, to move forward.

But what happened when that set of issues was just dropped from discussion.

It festered. And nearly destroyed this nation in a Civil War.

Indeed - perhaps - we have never really overcome the divisions of that war to this day.

There is a difficult struggle between maintaining one's idealism and compromising with approaches of realism. There are times and places for both - but even when the compromise is in order - one must recognize it as an UNFORTUNATE compromise and be eternally vigilent to maintain recognition of how far SHORT we are falling - and thus eternal striving for realization of the ideals rather than becoming complacent with the real (and ignoring its contradictions with the ideals).

Just some thoughts to reflect upon.

And try and go to the Alachua Project blog - we have been putting up some HISTORICAL materials (documents, articles, etc) - which show how long and how deep this problem goes - and how the events happening to me are a pattern being played out that has been done before.

Charlie Grapski

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