America Is an Idea Worth Defending – PJ Media

“When in the Course of human events…”

I suspect — I hope — everyone reading this recognizes that quotation instantly. Although I’m a little afraid that an American high school graduate, even a college graduate, might not. So for people who have been educated in American public schools in the last couple decades, it’s the first seven words of the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration continues: “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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

We forget how utterly radical this statement was. It asserts as an axiom — akin to stating a circle can have any center and radius — that all human beings, simply by virtue of being human, have rights no government can revoke, any more than a government can repeal gravity. Jefferson and his compatriots had been educated in geometry, logic, and reason in ways that have become unfashionable today.

They then set out to prove themselves right, and fought a war — eventually many wars — to preserve those rights. Another important definition is what constitutes a nation: now, by definition, a nation is a group of people with a shared culture, history, and identity.

By doing so, they declared the people of those thirteen former British Colonies of North America to be a nation, and then won themselves the right to be a state, or a confederation of states, constituting the geographical home of that nation.

This was really novel, a new idea — Switzerland, the Confederatio Helvetica, was formed as a confederation of cantons, but their central principle was they didn’t want to be a satrapy of the Habsburgs. The Dutch formed a state because they refused to remain a province of Spain. The Swiss and the Dutch rejected outside control, but Jefferson added a new Enlightenment ideal, a universal principle that people were entitled to the rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness “to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” This set the United States apart.

For 249 years, we’ve defended that idea and that nation — the nation of those who believe in those dusty old Enlightenment values.

It hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been cheap. We had to fight Britain again in just a few years. We fought to establish those rights for all men from the 1850s through 1865, at the cost of three-quarters of a million deaths, and we fought again in two world wars and many smaller wars in defense of the rights of people to be free.

This Memorial Day, we remember those people — men and women, of any race or religion or geography or ancestry — who fought and died to protect and preserve those rights.

The fight isn’t over. It will never be over, because there are always people who believe that they have the right to rule and to be ruled, what Jefferson called “the Aristocrats.” But it’s a worthy fight, a noble cause, and one worth defending.