Two things this evening

First, Calvin Coolidge's words about the Declaration on its 150th Anniversary:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.


The second, I'll link so you can read the whole thing, from Lawdog a few years back:

My siblings and I grew up in Africa, and the Middle East. We have seen poverty — the poverty where mothers make cold-blooded decisions about which child to sell so that she can feed the rest of her children.

America’s poor enjoy a level of comfort that is the envy of the well-off in Africa.

My brother and sister an I have seen repression — we have seen the crushing of the Ibo people (and we saw how the Ibo people treated their own ohu1 and osu2); the ‘Years Of Lead’ in Morocco aren’t a mystery to us; we weren’t there when the Gukurahundi3 swept through Matabeleland, but we knew some who disappeared; we saw the comfortable contempt of the Emiratis for the Filipino and Baluchi; and we have close personal experience with the casual repressive brutality of those cultures and many others.

America’s people enjoy a freedom from brutality and repression that is unimaginable for most of the rest of the planet.

Is America perfect? Of course not, but it is the closest thing to it that we will find this side of the grave.