TIME FOR A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN MANIFESTO

FLAG OF OUR FATHERS

THE WRITING OF THE DECLARATION 

Sunday, 7:40 AM.  -10 degrees F.  Wind NW, very gusty at times with severe wind chill effects.  The sky is clear and the sun rising unimpeded.  The humidity is 73% and the barometer trending up, currently at 30.61".  I let the dog out the door and he came back in rather quickly.  We won't take a walk until it warms up some.  We are in the depths of winter at least until next weekend.  A snowstorm is reportedly taking place along the lake shore from Cornucopia to the Rez.  It is indeed winter.
   I eschew politics on Sunday, but the topic today is more akin to religion, so here goes.

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   "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; among these being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
   There is no fuller, truer or more ennobling embodiment of the American ideal than these  lines from our Declaration of Independence.  We have wavered, we have wandered, we have taxed it to the limit, but despite all our stumbling our creed remains to guide us to a more perfect future for ourselves and all humanity.
   And yet we have been and still are mired in self-doubt and the recriminations of others.
   "God Bless America?  No, no, God Damn America! God Damn America!"
   Words hard to hear,  hard to bear, hard to counter.
   Harder still to hear, bear, and counter when they emanate from, or are echoed by, our leaders.
   The Founding Fathers were far ahead of many of their own sentiments and self interests when they wrote our declaration. Thomas Jefferson was rich in rhetoric but also in slaves.  We modern Americans have fallen far short of its ideals as well.  But self-doubt never got us Americans anything, or anywhere.
   We need a Twenty-First Century Manifesto, one which not only emulates our original declaration, in all its bravado, but gives us a strategic direction for the accomplishment of what truly is our national destiny; offering to every human being the gift of freedom from slavery of the body and of the spirit, so that all can pursue their individual destinies.
   Individual liberty is the font of Western civilization, a radical concept inherited from the ancient Greeks by us Americans, their spiritual descendants. And individual liberty, rooted in justice and the love of one's neighbor, is the central tenet of the Christian faith, upon which our country was founded and by which our liberties were authored.
   "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
   What more stirring mantra could any of us poor mortals devise?
   In my less charitable, more isolationist moments I am tempted for us to paraphrase Davey Crockett, and have us tell not the Tennessee Legislature ("I am going to Texas.  The rest of you can go to hell.") but the world:
   "We are going to Mars. The rest of you can go to hell," and with that break our  bonds with other societies and strike out towards our own rondevue with the future.
   But then I realize that our destiny is, truly, to save the world for the cause of liberty and justice, not only ourselves; a daunting enterprise that we have been engaged in now for several bloody centuries.   Only our truly exceptional nation, a composite of all the world's peoples, can accomplish this.
   We must not stop now, with the task half finished.  If we pause, let it be only to catch our breath.
   It is time for a Twenty-First Century American Manifesto, a clear vision of America's role in the world.  I am certainly not the one to to define it, but it sorely needs defining.  And quickly, before we stray further from our destiny's path.