Our birthday card for celebrating independence

If you’re trying to beat the excessive heat by staying indoors this Fourth of July weekend and you run out of things to do, let me offer a suggestion.

Read the Declaration of Independence.

At 1,338 words it’s actually a short read. I’m sure you could find it on Kindle, but instead of listening to someone else read it, you read it. We learn more when we engage our minds in the active exercise of reading versus the passive course of listening — although the latter is essential and needed more these days.

Don’t worry about memorizing anything. Why put that much stress on yourself?

Just read the document. It’s a fascinating work.

Sure, we’re all familiar — or at least most of us that paid attention during history classes — with it’s opening paragraphs. Eloquent statements about truths and rights and how it’s men who create institutions to uphold those rights through self-governance.

It’s been a long practice of viewing the Declaration of Independence in terms of these truths and rights, its emphasis on equality, life, liberty and chasing happiness as paramount not only as individual rights but collective rights — and of our right to enact change, even forceful change — if those rights are threatened.

But the document should also be viewed in how it pertains to the person/persons it was really directed at — those who want to rule by personal edict.

Kings, dictators, tyrants and the like. Almost three-quarters of those 1,338 words are grievances directed to the King of England at that time — George III.

And those grievances are significant. Not just about taxation without representation, denial of trial by jury, the quartering of soldiers in people’s homes and protecting those soldiers through mock trials when they act inappropriately.

The men who signed the Declaration, and those they represented, were also calling out the king for his dissolution of whole legislative bodies when they refused to act the way he wanted and of refusing to follow dutifully enacted laws unless people agreed to his demands.

Soldiers weren’t just housed against residents’ wishes, there were standing armies assigned to communities, there to influence people through displays of might and if needed force. There is also this grievance:

“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence were calling out an individual who ignored documented, duly enacted laws when they didn’t serve his purpose, required the military only answer to him and gave it power to usurp and replace civil authority at his direction, denied the right of free trade to those he ruled and used his power to enrich himself at the expense of the governed.

But wait, there’s more — but you should see what that is for yourself.

I know there’s a tendency to view this document at somewhat of a distance when we read it or talk about it. I think that’s partly due to its style, format and use of language —elements that are no longer common and removed by centuries from our communications lexicon.

But all of those grievances have modern corollaries, both here at home and abroad. When you read them, stop for a moment to modernize their meaning, I think you will see.

This July 4, we will celebrate our nation’s 245th birthday in ways we always have, and always should. It’s a big event, for the world really, and we should be proud of the role played in it by ourselves and our ancestors. Live it up — safely.

But we should also reflect at least a little bit on what that independence means, and how it started. The Declaration of Independence offers us a beginning.

Consider it sort of a birthday card — a really long, birthday card.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].