2025 Life Logs, Day 185: The Fourth of July, Today and 249 Years Ago
Date: Friday, July 4, 2025
Weather: Perfect Cape Cod Summer Day; High Temp 77, Low 58 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
This post is borrowed from my daughter’s Facebook page. I reposted it on my Facebook page and copy it here because it says everything that needs to be said on this day.
249 years ago. In between the parades, cookouts, and fireworks, please take a few minutes to sit with these words and reflect on their meaning.
July 4th does not mark victory in the war for independence, but rather, the moment when the need for drastic change and the gravity of the situation were formally recognized, and the principles for a new beginning were articulated. The world has changed in countless ways both large and small (including our ideas about capitalization as you will see as you read on), and we have yet to fully live up to those principles and ideals. Still, they are the foundation of our nation and important to remember.
Government is established to secure the inherent and equal rights of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Its power derives from the consent of the governed.
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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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security …
