With the Fourth of July falling on a Friday this year, many of us will be enjoying a long holiday weekend for which the weather is expected to cooperate.
The Fourth of July brings back fond recollections from our youth, when we celebrated the Fourth with cookouts and a bonfire at our grandmother’s house at Yirrell Beach on Pt. Shirley in Winthrop and took part in the annual Horribles Parade.
Those happy summer memories of our childhood on the beach with family members, most of whom are no longer with us, are etched indelibly in our mind’s eye and always bring a smile to our face as if they happened just yesterday, though they occurred more than half a century ago.
Amidst all of our celebrating however, we often overlook the reason why we have a Fourth of July: It was on that date 249 years ago when a group of America’s leaders and best thinkers gathered in Philadelphia to declare their independence from England by means of a proclamation to the world in which they stated, “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.”
We hasten to point out that in 1776, “men” literally meant only “white men.” About 20 percent — almost 500,000 persons — of the country’s 2.5 million population were enslaved. Half of the rest — women — were treated as chattel and did not have the right to vote in America until more than 150 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
But in the context of 2025, the basic premise of the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — resonates as loudly and as clearly as ever. To be sure, there are those in our country today who do not adhere to that belief. Racism, sexism, and prejudice still exist to a far-too-large extent.
But if we believe in the vision expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who often stated, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the essence of the Declaration of Independence remains as true today as it did in 1776.