The Declaration of Independence...

Today is the 4th of July, Independence day. Sarah Palin resigned. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan rages on. Many American are struggling with a faltering economy and lacking basic essentials including health care. Gay and lesbian Americans are fighting for both the right to serve in our military or the right to wed. Immigration has become a wedge issue, polarizing some Americans against others. This holiday weekend always serves to remind me that this democracy is a work in progress, that we sometimes err or encounter obstacles as we make our slow but steady march forward.

This march forward is ground in the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the most important document in American history. What Thomas Jefferson wrote in about a week in 1776 document represents what one historian--whose names escapes me--called "the closest thing to the magic words of American history. Those are the words that all Americans at some very very important level believe in... they are the essential words of the American creed".

Jefferson himself called it an expression of the American mind as he unleashed this document at the world. Within that document, these four sentences in particular still resonate, still inspire and represent the American spirit.

"We hold these truths to be self evident ...

"...that all men are created equal...

"... that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...

"...that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..."

Historian Joseph Ellis noted that Jefferson's genius was to assert them at a level of abstraction where they have a kind of rhapsodic inspirational quality and we all agree not to notice that they are unobtainable or that they are mutually exclusive and unobtainable.

But it was Harvard historian Daniel Boorstin who offers me the most comfort and hope as he explained the value, importance and relevance of the document. Jefferson "said that here in this place, the happiness of the human race may advance to an indefinite though not to an infinite degree. He expresses optimism and yet he refuses to be a utopian.

"And I think what distinguished our kind of society and the Jeffersonian view of our society from other is that is is not ideological. It is not stuck in the prism of some dogma but rather is constantly responding to the changes in the world and Thomas Jefferson was the apostle of that experience."

Like our democracy, the Declaration of Independence is alive and evolving--something those create obstacles in our path, those who say no in lieu of real discourse, those who claim to be the real patriots while they go about the business of denying other Americans the rights and freedoms intimated by this document might want to well remember and consider on this very special day.