Happy Independence Day 🗽 July 4th — Ronald Reagan 1986 * PITD

Happy Independence Day — July 4th — Ronald Reagan 1986 * PITD
speech at Statue of Liberty Centennial on July 4th, 1986
It’s recorded that, shortly after the Declaration of independence was signed in Philadelphia, celebrations took place throughout the land, and many of the former colonists, they were just starting to call themselves Americans, set off cannons and marched in fife and drum parades.
What a contrast with the silver seat was taken place a short time earlier in Independence Hall. 56 men came forward to sign the parchment. It was noted at the time that they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors.
And that was more than rhetoric. Each of those men knew the penalty for high treason to the crown.
“We must all hang together,” Benjamin Franklin said, “Or assuredly, we will all hang separately.”
And John Hancock, it is said, wrote his signature in large script, so King George could see it without his spectacles. They were brave. They stayed brave through all the bloodshed of the coming years. Their courage created a nation built on a universal claim to human dignity. On the proposition that every man, woman, and child had a right to a future of freedom.
For just a moment, let us listen to the words again:
“We hold these truths to be self evident. 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.”
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The hope symbolized in this statue here just behind us, the hope that is America. It is a hope that someday every people and every nation of the world will know the blessings of Liberty. And it’s the hope of millions all around the world.
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And I’ve seen the successors to these brave men, the young Americans in uniform all over the world. Young Americans like you here tonight, who man the mighty USS Kennedy, and the Iowa on the other ships of the line. I can assure you, you out there who are listening, that these young people are like their fathers and their grandfathers, just as willing, just as brave. And we can be just as proud.
But our prayer tonight is that the call for their courage will never come. And that it’s important for us to, to be brave. Not so much the bravery of the battlefield, I mean the bravery of brotherhood.
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After a bitter and divisive campaign, Jefferson defeated Adams for the presidency in 1800. And the night before Jefferson’s inauguration, Adams slipped away to Boston, disappointed, brokenhearted and bitter. For years their estrangement lasted.
But then when both had retired, Jefferson at 68 to Monticello, and Adams at 76 to Quincy, they began through their letters to speak again to each other.
Letters that discussed almost every conceivable subject; gardening, horseback riding, even sneezing as a cure for hiccups, but other subjects as well. The loss of loved ones, the mystery of grief and sorrow, the importance of religion.
And of course the last thoughts, final hopes of two old men, two great patriarchs for the country that they had helped to found, and loved so deeply.
“It carries me back,” Jefferson wrote about correspondence with his co-signer of the Declaration of Independence, “To the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right to self-government. Laboring, always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless, we rode through this storm with heart and hand.”
It was their last gift to us, this lesson in brotherhood, in tolerance for each other, this insight into America’s strength as a nation. And when both died on the same day, within hours of each other, that date was July 4th, fifty years exactly after that first gift to us, the Declaration of Independence.
My fellow Americans, it falls to us to keep faith with them, and all the great Americans of our past. Believe me, if there’s one impression I carry with me after the privilege of holding for five and a half years, the office held by Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln, it is this, that the things that unite us, America’s past of which we’re so proud, our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much-loved country. These things far outweigh what little divides us.
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I am a proud American, blessed father, a staunch 2A activist and a Marine Corps Veteran that just happens to be 100% blind. This is a look at the Second Amendment, firearms, self Defense, Constitutionally protected rights, Liberty and Freedom from the perspective of a Visually Impaired, Blind American. #PatriotInTheDark
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