People Are Reminded Of Duplicative History Of Declaration of Independence By Beacon City Council Member Air Nonken Rhodes
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As we reflect on July 4th and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is refreshing to read these words from a Beacon City Council member:
Repost from Air Nonken Rhodes:
I was disheartened anew reading the Declaration of Independence this morning that every single one of the list of grievances stated by the document's authors could have just as easily been stated emphatically by the indigenous people of this continent, protesting against the (much worse) injustices and unjust tyranny of the English (and other) colonists. Of course, the English colonists' claim to independent sovereignty on this land was only made possible by the brutal, duplicitous conquest of the then-recent "French and Indian War" (1754-1763) and the hundred years of smaller "wars" that put down native people's attempts (diplomatic and military) to throw off the yoke of European colonists, but decimated the remaining indigenous populations and their ability to sustain their communities. Were the Founding Fathers aware of the irony, that they were perpetuating exactly the same oppressions about which they were complaining they were victim, but on a vastly more devastating scale? The extra dash of bitterness to this holiday's history comes from how in 1773, in the protest that became known as the Boston Tea Party, the participants (who included Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and many other of our founding icons) disguised themselves as Mohawks to scapegoat the native peoples as the perpetrators of the protest.
The Native Americans were not the only ones whose life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were systematically excluded by the Founding Fathers. Our nation's history has largely been a history of the struggle of those excluded at its start. In 1852, 75 years after our county's start, Frederick Douglas laid bare the continued failure of its aspirations:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."
(I encourage you to read the entirety of the excellent speech from which this quote is excerpted.)
Despite all of this, I like much of the text of the Declaration of Independence. Much of what it says are values and actions to which we must aspire (as urgently as possible). It is revolutionary. If you haven't read it recently, the full text is at archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript. The section I transcribed onto my flag here reads:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [wo]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 to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government. Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shewn that [wo]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 evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government."
This statement is the proud foundation for American protest, which had existed long before the Declaration and has its legitimacy outside of this text, but which is by this text enshrined as a most essential American value. It took the elites themselves feeling oppressed (by taxes on imported luxury goods, of course) to decide to utilize protest as a mechanism of change. As James Leamon notes in “Maine in the American Revolution," “In the eighteenth century an urban mob, riot, or ‘crowd action’ constituted a semi-legitimate means of social protest. …Crowds were useful if kept in control, but they …remained ‘legitimate’ only as long as they served the community interests— as defined by the elite.” The People today are starting to chip away at that power. Just as it has taken, and continues to take, hundreds of years to define and expand the "man" in the phrase "all men are created equal", to wrest power of that definition out of the hands of landowning white men and into the hands of The People - We are making incremental progress? And I still believe that we must actively aspire to the rights of people to determine their governance, and the inherancy of all people's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. That's something I can celebrate today.
