The Sun is Rising

I come to you, flush with pride on the eve of the anniversary of the publishing of the document giving the double middle finger to Euro-trash voting-restrictive government by white men only. And it would only be seven short years later that the war would be won and we would be free to implement immediately all the principles professed in the Declaration of Independence. Or really I guess like 11 years later when our present Constitution was completed. Or if you want to get really, really technical, I guess maybe when the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution were passed abolishing slavery and guaranteeing equal protection under the law. And if I were getting really nitpicky, maybe I'd say we had to wait until the late 1960s and the Lyndon Johnson administration before we saw the de jure rights alluded to in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights become de facto in any kind of enforceable way through large parts of the country. BUT STILL, July 4, 1776... Big day. Big day.

I like to think we're still holding true to the tenets expressed in the Declaration. You have to remember them in context. These were a bunch of dudes sitting around together, pretty sure that they'd all hang for treason, just spit-ballin' some ideas to throw some hardcore shade in the direction of the then most powerful man on the whole planet, King George III of the United Kingdom. It's really just the most successful ever single page taken from a super bitchy burn book, directed only at one guy. It was something thrown together as a goof that has gone on to totally unexpected social and cultural ubiquity. Like Grumpy Cat or Gangnam Style.

We can be snarky about it I guess, with the little details about the subjugation of women or the slavery oversight implicit in the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" clause, but I think because of the total expectation of failure, they were free to roll out some blue-sky thinking. The Declaration is aspirational. It's not descriptive, it's prescriptive. "This is what we'd like our country to be, if only we could get this gross imperialist monkey off our backs."

It's provided us a blueprint of what to shoot for since then. And sometimes we had to actually shoot for it. But even though we've constantly been harangued and delayed and even derailed by foot-draggers and panicked reactionaries from amongst our own ranks, that hasn't stopped us from retconning those hard-fought, barely won victories of bloody attrition into gold-nugget tropes of foundational, revelational TRUTH. This is what the Declaration of Independence allows us to do. African slaves and their American descendants got their missing two-fifths back. Eventually. Chicks could totally vote. Eventually. Gay people were allowed to not enter into horrible sham marriages with straight people of the opposite gender because it became legal for them to enter horrible honest marriages with one another. Eventually.* And we do it all with graceful cover, where we can crow that look, from the very beginning, this is what America is all about. Eventually.

Failure into victory. That's why this week's heroes are Tim Howard and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Soccer and reproductive freedom. Setbacks now, sure, but you know... say it with me... eventually.

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*More or less. Getting there. Good work this week, Kentucky!