EDITORIAL:Remember the sacrifices made for our freedom while celebrating this weekend.
"The social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic; this was its character at the foundation of the colonies, and it is still more strongly marked at the present day."
The French aristocrat Alexis De Tocqueville offered this observation in his classic work, "Democracy in America," which documented his tour of the United States in 1831 and 1832.
At the time, the country was barely 55 years old. Its southern states still held slaves and women were denied the right to vote. But the promise was there, contained within our founding document, "The Declaration of Independence."
It has been 227 years now since 56 men put their names to a piece of parchment, severing the colonies’ ties to England and risking their lives to secure liberty and freedom for a new nation and for the generations that followed:
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident," Thomas Jefferson wrote in "The Declaration of Independence, "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."
We have not always lived up to these lofty sentiments, but our history has been one of progress and change. Despite our flaws and some of them have been great we have managed to survive and thrive as a nation.
Slavery was abolished and women were granted the right to vote. After years of struggle, the unequal treatment of blacks (and Hispanics and Jews and Asians and other minorities) is disappearing though much more needs to be done.
We ask our readers to remember, as they celebrate Independence Day with fireworks and barbecues, the more than 227 years of sacrifices made to ensure our liberty and freedoms, to honor the soldiers and statesmen, the thinkers and activists and average working people who have helped make the United States a beacon of freedom to the world.
"It is rather for us, the living, "to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us," President Abraham Lincoln said in his 1863 address dedicating the Gettysburg battlefield, "that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth."