On July 4, Congressman Alan Grayson from Florida's 9th district issued a new declaration that built on FDR's January 6, 1941 declaration of four freedoms that people the world over should enjoy -- freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Grayson believes we also need to declare our independence from "other forms of oppression" -- specifically, from bigotry, from the greedy, from "narrow-minded, extremist or violent fundamentalism", from exploitation, from "1984-style surveillance," from misinformation, from hubris, and lastly, from "a rigged system of faked trade."
In Roosevelt's case, he claimed that his was "no vision of a distant millennium", but instead is "a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation."
One wonders what he'd think of what we've made of the world since then. Would he be ashamed, dismayed, that we haven't met his challenge to realize these freedoms on any broad scale?
Grayson does not seem so optimistic about the human race when it comes to achieving his enumerated freedoms from oppression within our lifetime. However, he notes that personally walks the walk in his final declaration of independence "from the corrupt system of campaign finance." Walker says, "the only Member of Congress to draw most of his campaign funds from contributions of less than $200."
Then there was stirring speech by then-president-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 17, 2009 in Baltimore, just a few days before his first inauguration, which encapsulates some of Grayson's vision and Roosevelt's optimism for overcoming what some considering insurmountable in order to realize a better day here and now:
We are here today not simply to pay tribute to those patriots who founded our nation in Philadelphia or defended it in Baltimore, but to take up the cause for which they gave so much. The trials we face are very different now, but severe in their own right. Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. Two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely. A planet that is warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil.
And yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that those first patriots displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives -- from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry -- an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.
Yet this overlooks the fact that most of our original pantheon of patriots, admirable as they were in ever so many respects, also were enchained by prejudice and bigotry (and hence small thinking and ideology to some degree).
Many who have written declarations in the generations since our July 4, 1776 document -- from those seeking suffrage for women, to equal rights for black Americans, to equal rights for LGBT Americans -- not only have adapted much of the language of the original, but have made us aware of our contradictions and hypocrisies in a way that, rather than put us on the defensive, appeals to "our better angels" rather than all too easy instincts.
I personally believe one of the glaring blindspots we still need to come to grips with today is our treatment of children and youth, and their marginalization in civic life. I have issued a declaration of sorts in this regard and elaborated at more length elsewhere about why I feel this is so important, and why we must remedy this.
How about you? What's your declaration? What problems and prejudices do you think must we own up to, confront and surmount in our time -- and how should we go about it?