Forming a More Perfect Union
July 4th, 2009 |
Guest Editorial
by Barack Obama
This weekend, our family will join millions of others in celebrating America. We will enjoy the glow of fireworks, the taste of barbeque, and the company of good friends. As we all celebrate this weekend, let’s also remember the remarkable story that led to this day.
Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, our nation was born when a courageous group of patriots pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the proposition that all of us were created equal.
Our country began as a unique experiment in liberty — a bold, evolving quest to achieve a more perfect union. And in every generation, another courageous group of patriots has taken us one step closer to fully realizing the dream our founders enshrined on that great day.
Today, all Americans have a hard-fought birthright to a freedom which enables each of us, no matter our views or background, to help set our nation’s course. America’s greatness has always depended on her citizens embracing that freedom — and fulfilling the duty that comes with it.
As free people, we must each take the challenges and opportunities that face this nation as our own. As long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content. And as America comes ever closer to achieving the perfect Union our founders dreamed, that triumph — that pride — belongs to all of us.
So today is a day to reflect on our independence, and the sacrifice of our troops standing in harm’s way to preserve and protect it. It is a day to celebrate all that America is. And today is a time to aspire toward all we can still become.
With very best wishes,
President Barack Obama
July 4th, 2009
P.S. — Our nation’s birthday is also an ideal time to consider serving in your local community. You can find many great ideas for service opportunities near you at Serve.Gov.
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July 5th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Very good message.
Some additional observations about American independence would have to include first, that the United States is the first nation ever founded not on race, religion, nationality or conquest but on an ideal, that being egalitarian liberty.
The founders intended, not in the George Bush fashion, but in the fashion of creating a model to emulate, that the entire world adopt this principle. They were very much anti-imperialist, anti-monarchist, anti-authoritarian, and believed that free people could govern themselves without the need of a professional governing class.
Oops. Here we are 233 years later and once again we have a professional governing class. They’re not called royalty and nobility these days, but they exist in the form of career politicians and life-long civil service bureaucrats, and their grip on power is every as real as was that of King George and his mandarin minions.
We are already in danger of forgetting the central lesson of Barack Obama’s election, and that was, in a system where relatively free elections are held, any autocratic tendencies can be reversed.
That we have not done so is evident in the extremely high re-election rate of congressional incumbents and legislators in many states.
America’s full promise has yet to be realized, but it will not be realized by an increasingly powerful non-elected mandarin class, but by a new form of radical restructuring that returns power to people and prunes back the buds of an evolving latter-day aristocracy.
Either that, or we can start reading Frank Herbert’s Dune series as a guide to what’s in store for humanity during coming decades and centuries.