Editorial: Let freedom ring

The greatest thing America has ever done is to stand up to tyranny and declare itself to be free.

Before our nation was a nation, we sowed the seeds of what we would become.

Before we had a representational democratic republic, people acting in our collective interest sat in collaboration. They debated how best to proceed under unfair treatment from the king in London. For years — years — they sent letters, asked to negotiate and expressed their feelings. They did so in a body they called the Continental Congress, a name that survives in part in our legislature today.

They did not break away from Great Britain lightly. It was an action they took when they felt there was nowhere left to turn and no way to continue as a people seen as less than true British citizens.

If they could not be treated fairly as part of the kingdom, they would demand fair treatment as citizens of a separate nation. The congress informed King George III of that via the Declaration of Independence, adopted July 4, 1776.

That is considered to be America’s birthday. But it isn’t. Not quite.

America took its first breath two days earlier with the adoption of Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee’s Resolution — a vote in which the congress spoke freedom into being.

“Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved,” it read.

In 47 words, on a day people forget, 13 colonies became 13 states.

Does that negate the Declaration’s importance? Not at all.

If Lee’s Resolution is our birth certificate, the Declaration is our baptismal record. In its first line, we are given our name. In its 1,337 words, formal and respectful, it draws an outline for the nation we planned to become — one of equal footing, unalienable rights and the consent of the governed.

Our founding fathers did not simply stamp their collective foot and fold their arms, mutinously saying no to the king. They did not merely rebel at the treatment they were afforded. They gave thought to the kind of nation America should be and started a journey to arrive at that destination.

We are not there yet.

We may have said we are all created equal, but we struggle to make that truth as self-evident as the Declaration said. We said our rights are unalienable, but it has taken 249 years of polishing our laws to get where we are, and every day there are new threats to those rights. We said we believe in the consent of the governed but still wrestle with that reality.

That is not a criticism of our country. It is an acceptance of the fact that, when you begin your nation with an ideal, you sail toward the horizon. We do not reach the goal. We strive daily to stay on the course.

Every day in America should be like the first — a day we stand up to tyranny and declare ourselves to be free.