Today, America celebrates the 232nd Year of our Independence as a people and a nation. I'm proud to be an American. Are you? Sure I don't like everything, but I'd rather be here than any place on earth. This country was built on freedom. And freedom to be in our own business and work from home is one of those freedoms. I never liked history much until I realized some of those dead guys were my ancestors. Patrick Henry was one of them. Several of my ancestors died in the American Revolution and I'm sure some of yours did too. God bless America!
Contrary to popular belief, the traditional parades, speeches and fireworks each July 4th actually do not commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, we're celebrating the first announcement in Philadelphia that the Second Continental Congress was adopting the Declaration of Independence.
Actually, most of the delegates did not sign an engrossed copy of the Declaration until August 2, 1776. This Declaration is now on display in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Make a point of going to see this document if you can. Reading each of those 56 signatures on the original parchment makes the global revolution for human liberty really come alive. It's a revolution we have a duty to sustain.
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be 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.
Drafted by a distinguished committee headed by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is one of the most memorable freedom documents of all time, proclaiming as it does, every human being's right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
As Thomas Jefferson lay dying at his Virginia hilltop estate, Monticello, in late June 1826, he wrote a letter to the citizens in Washington, D.C. saying he was too ill to join them for their 50th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence.
It was the last letter Jefferson ever wrote. He died 10 days later on July 4, 1826, within hours of his old friend, fellow Founder, and fellow former President of the United States, John Adams.
In this last letter Jefferson expressed his wish that "the annual return of this day" would "forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them." You can read the full letter here.
Jefferson was speaking to us too. Is that what this day means to you?
56 signers with 56 different hardships Pause today and ask yourself what you would be willing to sacrifice for our country?
The brave Americans who signed the Declaration of Independence risked their lives and fortunes. But they also indelibly enhanced their "sacred honor" by their resolute act of defiance of King George III. Many of those men lost everything and some died as a result.
Among the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, five signers were captured by the British and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Their families were scattered and their wives and children died.
Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.
And subsequently in these 232 years, nearly 1,300,000 Americans have died defending that independence and the new freedoms it produced for all Americans who have ever lived.
In my view America, as a nation and as a people, needs to reaffirm and reassert our hard won liberty and freedom. And when we intone "God Bless America" we must mean and deserve it.
We truly need to understand and to apply the fundamentals of limited government, individual freedom, equal protection under the law and due process. We're all now called to question the limitless and at times perverse "war on terrorism."
If Jefferson's dream of the future is fading in America, our ultimate task is to restore that dream and exalt America's true purpose. We must build that "shining city on a hill" about which Massachusetts Bay Colony's governor John Winthrop, and later President Ronald Reagan, spoke so eloquently.
When our own American house is in order, the world again will look to America for example - just as the world did on that hot July day in Philadelphia way back in 1776.
This task of renewal should be our personal task - yours and mine on this 4th of July - as America begins the 233rd Year of our Independence. And if you haven't started a business from home, start one today. Take a stand for your rights as an American.
Annie
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