Independence Day affords the opportunity to reflect upon what historian Joseph Ellis calls “the seminal statement of the American Creed.” It declares new, revolutionary ideas which become the foundation to the formation of the Constitution in 1789.

These words are embodied in the Declaration of Independence and declare, “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.”

Abraham Lincoln, in 1858, said of these words: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, the forecast, and capacity to introduce into a mere revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applying to all men and times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of the reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

The American Creed defines who we are as a people and a nation, without regard to our ethnicity, our race, our origin.

It conveys a heritage of freedom which we are to embrace and pass on to those who follow.

What better day to do this than July 4, 2009, and each Independence Day thereafter?

Conrad Green

Poulsbo